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International audience; This paper presents CCBL (Cascading Contexts Based Language), an end-user programming language dedicated to Smart Home. We design CCBL to avoid the problems encountered by end-users programming with ECA (Event Conditions Actions), which is the dominant approach in the domain. We present the results of an experiment where we asked 21 adults (11 experimented programmers and 10 non-programmers) to express four increasingly complex behaviors using both CCBL and ECA. We show that significantly less errors were made using CCBL than using ECA. From this experiment, we also propose some categorization and explanation of the errors made when using ECA and explain why users avoid these errors when programming with CCBL. CCS Concepts: • Computer systems organization → Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI) → Ubiquitous and mobile computing systems and tools; • Software and its engineering → Software notations and tools → Context specific languages → Domain specific languages

International audience; These last years, several new home automation boxes appeared on the market, the new radio-based protocols facilitating their deployment with respect to previously wired solutions. Coupled with the wider availability of connected objects, these protocols have allowed new users to set up home automation systems by themselves. In this paper, we relate an in situ observational study of these builders in order to understand why and how the smart habitats were developed and used. We led 10 semi-structured interviews in households composed of at least 2 adults and equipped for at least 1 year, and 47 home automation builders answered an online questionnaire at the end of the study. Our study confirms, specifies and exhibits additional insights about usages and means of end-user development in the context of home automation.

Mobility coupled with the development of a wide variety of access devices has engendered new requirements for HCI such as the ability of user interfaces (UI) to adapt to different contexts of use. By context of use, we mean the triple . This paper first analyses the problem space of adaptation then proposes a reference framework covering both the development and execution of plastic UI. This framework helps in structuring the state of the art. It emphasises two open issues that we propose to address by an agent and conceptual graphs-based approach. The paper is illustrated on a running example CamNote that supports the presentation of slides in different contexts of use.

National audience; We present KISS (Knit your Ideas Into Smart Spaces), an end-user development system for the home. KISS enables users to program their home with sentences expressed in a pseudo-natural language. Programs can be tested either with the virtual home or in the real home. In this paper, we describe KISS and report an evaluation that shows that users are able to program a real-life scenario.; Nous présentons KISS (Knit your Ideas Into Smart Spaces), un outil de développement d'habitat intelligent par l'utilisateur final. KISS permet de programmer son habitat en termes de phrases exprimées en langage pseudonaturel. La mise au point de ces programmes peut se faire in situ dans l'appartement réel ou dans sa réplique virtuelle. L'évaluation de KISS montre que les utilisateurs parviennent à programmer un scénario réaliste.

Long paper - Session: Design esxploration; International audience; Examples browsing is a common designer practice in user interface design. Several design galleries can be found on Internet. However, those galleries are hand crafted and thus limited and cumbersome to build. In this paper, we claim for tools for supporting both the production and exploration of examples. We describe a running prototype based on Interactive Genetic Algorithms (IGA), and relate an early evaluation.

International audience; Fostering creativity in User Interface (UI) design is challenging for innovation. This paper explores the combination of model-based approaches and interactive genetic algorithms to foster the exploration of the design space. A user task model is given in input. Magellan produces sketches of UIs that aim at inspiring the designer. Later on, appropriate tools may be used to tune the right design into the design right. Magellan is a proof of concept that deserves further exploration. Currently it is implemented using COMETs but it is not dependent of this technology.

This paper reports on an empirical study performed to validate a theoretical model about the composition of smart artifacts by end-users. We have solicited 17 families and used a combination of interviews and a playful cultural probe. Results show that families are willing to couple smart objects to improve their lives, and that the theoretical questions raised by our model are sound. New services are more easily envisioned when coupling involves a "communicating" object or a "programmable" object. Being a communicating object has more impact than being programmable. Services envisioned by families included: Service substitution (e.g., replacing the user interface of the alarm clock with that of the time setting available on mobile phones); Service improvement (e.g., extending appliances such as the washing machine, by coupling them with the interaction resources of the TV set); Service chaining as ready for use "packages" to improve well-being for routine activities; along with Service "starters" as a means to control packages. Other findings are related to the playful cultural probe. Based on pictures of objects taken by the family members, our probe served as an ice-breaker; family members "revealed their house" naturally and the use of images of intimate objects increased interest and imagination.

International audience; How can people identify the services that they might expect from their smart home when they have little to no knowledge about novel technologies? This paper reports on a user needs analysis method designed to answer this question: DisQo. We have recruited 17 families and used a combination of interviews and playful cultural probes. Results show that families are willing to couple smart objects to improve their lives.

Mobility and integration of systems into the physical environment are key challenges for computer science. In particular, User Interfaces (UI) must accommodate variations in the context of use while preserving human-centered properties. We call this capacity UI plasticity. This tutorial begins by reviewing ideas from the last decade concerning the plasticity of user interfaces. From this starting point, it develops key ideas and perspectives for the near future. These are illustrated with a demo of a tool for prototyping plastic widgets and UIs.In the near future, there will be a need for elaborating a theory of adaptation to predict and explain the difficulties that users encounter when adaptation occurs. Secondly, in order to go beyond simplistic UI adaptation, there will be a need to bring together advances in several research areas including HCI (to support multimodality), Software Engineering (in particular, Model-Driven Engineering, Aspect Oriented Programming, as well as components and services, to cover both design time and run time adaptation), as well as Artificial Intelligence (to support situated information and planning). Indeed, in most current research, the user's task model is assumed as given and is used as the starting point for generating UIs on the fly. In addition, the functional core is considered to be stable rather than compliant with opportunistic discovery of services. In the coming years, we will need to confront challenges that go beyond HCI: (1) incompleteness and uncertainty of the system perception of both the context of use and of the appropriateness of the adapted UI; (2) combinatory explosion when composing a UI for sustaining emergent users goals. Finally, we will need to develop environments (or studios) for UI Plasticity to integrate partial advances, to make the theory operational and to alleviate designers and developers task.

Multi-touch large display interfaces are becoming increasingly popular in public spaces. These spaces impose specific requirements on the accessibility of the user interfaces: most users are not familiar with the interface and expectations with regard to user experience are very high. Multi-touch interaction beyond the traditional move-rotate-scale interactions is often unknown to the public and can become exceedingly complex. We introduce TouchGhosts: visual guides that are embedded in the multi-touch user interface and that demonstrate the available interactions to the user. TouchGhosts are activated while using an interface, providing guidance on the fly and within the context-of-use. Our approach allows to define reconfigurable strategies to decide how or when a TouchGhost should be activated and which particular visualization will be presented to the user.

Plasticity of User Interfaces (UIs) refers to the ability of UIs to withstand variations of context of use () while preserving usability. This paper presents COMET, a software architecture style for building task-based plastic interactors. COMET bridges the gap between two main approaches in plasticity: model-driven engineering and interactors toolkits. Interactors that are compliant to the COMET style are called COMETs. These COMETs are multi-rendering multi-technological interactors (WIMP and post-WIMP, Web and non Web as well as vocal). COMETs are extensible and controllable by the user (up until now the designer, in the future the end-user). The COMET architecture and the use of COMETs are illustrated on an executable prototype: a slide viewer called CamNote++.

Currently, it is difficult for a designer to create user interfaces that are of high aesthetic quality for a continuously growing range of devices with varied screen sizes. Most existing approaches use abstractions that only support form-based user interfaces. These user interfaces may be usable but are of low aesthetic quality. In this paper, we present a technique to design adaptive graphical user interfaces by example (i.e., user interfaces that can adapt to the target platform, the user, etc.), which can produce user interfaces of high aesthetic quality while reducing the development cost inherent to manual approaches. Designing adaptive user interfaces by example could lead to a new generation of design tools that put adaptive user interface development within the reach of designers as well as developers.

In this paper, we describe the COMETs Inspector, a software tool providing user interface designers and developers with a semantic network in order to control the plasticity of their User Interfaces (UI) at run-time. Thanks to a set of predefined relationships, the semantic network links together various concepts ranging from the final UI (i.e., the UI described in terms of technological spaces) to the concrete and abstract UIs (i.e., the UI respectively described in terms of concrete interaction objects independently of any technological space, and abstract individual components and containers independently of any interaction modality) up to the tasks and concepts of the interactive system. In this way, plasticity can be addressed at four levels of abstraction (task and concepts, abstract, concrete, and final user interface) for forward, reverse, and lateral engineering. The end user exploits the semantic network at run time to adapt his/her UI to another context of use by identifying, selecting, and applying plasticity suitable operations.

User Interface (UI) plasticity denotes UI adaptation to the context of use (user, platform, physical and social environments) while preserving usability. In this article, we focus on the use of Model-Driven Engineering and demonstrate how the intrinsic flexibility of this approach can be exploited by designers for UI prototyping as well as by end-users in real settings. For doing so, the models developed at design-time, which convey high-level design decisions, are still available at run-time. As a result, an interactive system is not limited to a set of linked pieces of code, but is a graph of models that evolves, expresses and maintains multiple perspectives on the system from top-level tasks to the final UI. A simplified version of a Home Heating Control System is used to illustrate our approach and technical implementation.

User interface (UI) plasticity denotes UI adaptation to the context of use (user, platform, physical and social environment) while preserving usability. Our approach to this problem is to bring together MDE (Model Driven Engineering) and SOA (Service Oriented Approach) within a unified framework that covers both the development stage and the runtime phase of plastic UI's. In particular, an interactive system is modelled as a graph of models that can be dynamically manipulated by, and/or encapsulated as services.

Ubiquitous computing has introduced the need for interactive systems to run on multiple platforms in different physical environments. Providing a user interface specially crafted for each context of use ( ) is costly, may result in inconsistent behaviors [5] and above all is limited to the contexts of use that have been envisioned at design time. Opportunistic interaction in a changing environment requires enabling approaches and techniques for gracefully adapting the interactive system to its context of use. In Human-Computer Interaction, this ability of an interactive system to withstand variations of context of use while preserving its quality in use is called plasticity [7]. This paper shows how Model Driven Engineering is suited for supporting plasticity both at design time and run time.

This paper addresses software adaptation to context of use. It goes one step further than our early work on plasticity [5]. Here, we propose a revision of the notion of software plasticity that we apply at the widget level in terms of comets. Plasticity is defined as the ability of an interactive system to withstand variations of context of use while preserving quality in use where quality in use refers to the ISO definition. Plasticity is not limited to the UI components of an interactive system, nor to a single platform: adaptation to context of use may also impact the functional core, it may have an effect on the nature of the connectors, and it may draw upon the existence of multiple platforms in the vicinity to migrate all or portions of the interactive system. A new reference framework that structures the development process of plastic interactive systems is presented to cover these issues. The framework is then applied at the granularity of widgets to provide the notion of a comet. A comet is an introspective widget that is able to self-adapt to some context of use, or that can be adapted by a tier-component to the context of use, or that can be dynamically discarded (versus recruited) when it is unable (versus able) to cover the current context of use. To do so, a comet publishes the quality in use it guarantees, the user tasks and the domain concepts that it is able to support, as well as the extent to which it supports adaptation.

This paper defines the problem space of distributed, migratable and plastic user interfaces, and presents CAMELEON-RT, a technical answer to the problem. CAMELEON-RT1 is an architecture reference model that can be used for comparing and reasoning about existing tools as well as for developing future run time infrastructures for distributed, migratable, and plastic user interfaces. We have developed an early implementation of a run time infrastructure based on the precepts of CAMELEON-RT.

Adaptation of User Interfaces (UI) to context of use is becoming a major issue in HCI. By context of use, we mean the triplet. Plasticity refers to the ability of UIs to withstand variations of context of use while preserving usability. Based on a reference framework that provides designers with a powerful tool for reasoning about plasticity, this paper addresses plasticity at the level of interactors. Comets (COntext sensitive Multi-target widgETS) are a new kind of widget that support adaptation at any level of abstraction: concepts and tasks, abstract, concrete and final UIs. This paper proposes a model as well as run-time software mechanisms that support the design of comets as well as run-time adaptation. Run-time is ruled according to a set of strategies and politics.

This paper deals with Plasticity of User Interfaces (UI). Plasticity refers to the ability of UIs to withstand variations of context of use while preserving usability. By context of use, we mean a

This paper deals with Games and Mixed Reality. Based on players experience, it proposes both a model and a classification of mixed games. The model helps the designer in specifying entities that are involved in the game. The specification covers both the support of the entities and their internal and external relationships. The classification structures games in levels of abstraction. It gives rise to a rough evaluation method applied to a real case study: Rasende Roboter. This game has been suggested by players because of its attractiveness. The paper compares the traditional and mixed versions.

International audience; The adaptation of user interfaces (UI) is a problem that simultaneously demands a detailed knowledge of man-machine interaction but also knowledge of interactive systems as a whole, going beyond the field of man-machine interaction, to be able to choose from many aspects of information technology, software engineering and distributed systems notably. As shown in this chapter, software engineering and distributed systems deal with software adaptation. However, the human element is often forgotten. This is why, in 1999, we introduced the concept of plasticity of man-machine interfaces to qualify user-centred adaptation. This is the object of this chapter that we will structure in two sections: one to define precisely the concept of UI plasticity and its problem space, the other, in two instalments, dedicated to technical implementation: the frames of reference and our recommendations on how to implement them. We will conclude on this chapter the gains and the problems found.