An "intent-oriented" approach for Multi-Device User Interface Design

Abstract

A large number of heterogeneous and computing devices, such as PCs, PDAs, and cell phones, nowadays are used to access the same information. Currently, designers designing such multi-device user interfaces have to design a UI separately for each device, which is a time consuming and error prone activity. This paper discusses our approach to the multi-device interface development. In particular we describe how abstract UI descriptions and task model management systems can be combined to develop adaptive UIs for a wide range of devices. The designed software framework allows generating the concrete user interface at runtime, by adapting it to the client's execution environment. As shown in the example application, three different environments have been the target of our implementation work: standard PCs, PDAs and mobile phones equipped with Java micro edition