Facilitating user interface adaptation to mobile devices

Abstract

One vision of a context-aware pervasive networking environment promises the user a seamless access to surrounding services using her personal mobile device. This requires that the user interface of a service application has to be separated from the application logic and adapted to whatever type of mobile device the user is using to access it. The problem the user interface software developer faces is not only how to manage the heterogeneous platforms and different capabilities of users' devices, but also how to initiate the process of user interface adaptation. This paper proposes a reference model architecture to facilitate the development of adaptable user interfaces in a context-aware pervasive networking environment (Capnet). The initiation of adaptation process is facilitated by introducing the Capnet User Interface component, which acts as a user interface front-end to a mobile device. The component provides the user interface software developer several optional ways to generate the remote user interface using HTML or WML, Java or an XML-based scripting language. Thus, the model enables the use of existing Web-based user interface solutions as well as the creation of new ones that better meet the adaptivity and context-awareness requirements inherent in such an environment.