Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) make software easy to use by providing the user with visual controls. Therefore, correctness of GUI’s code is essential to the correct execution of the overall software. Models can help in the evaluation of interactive applications by allowing designers to concentrate on its more important aspects. This paper describes our approach to reverse engineer an abstract model of a user interface directly from the GUI’s legacy code. We also present results from a case study. These results are encouraging and give evidence that the goal of reverse engineering user interfaces can be met with more work on this technique.

The desire for increasingly intuitive and immersive visualization systems has created a need for diverse resources that support the human-computer interface. Visualization laboratories have growing sets of these specialised resources and managing them has become a complicated and lengthy task. Choosing and utilising resources in a given visualization requires extensive information about each to be available. This paper presents an ontological approach to the description of resources, their capabilities, and their software interfaces. Using this ontology, a software design for the support of resource detection, choice and utilisation is presented. By breaking the dependency of visualizations on specific resources, adaptability and portability is improved.

Most existing graphical user interfaces are usually designed for a fixed context of use, thus making them rather difficult to modify for other contexts of use, such as for other users, other platforms, and other environments. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a new visual design method for graphical users interfaces referred to as “visual design by (de)composition”. In this method, any individual or composite component of a graphical user interface is submitted to a series of operations for composing a new interface from existing components and for decomposing an existing one into smaller pieces that can be used in turn for another interface. For this purpose, any component of a user interface is described by specifications that are consistently written in a user interface description language that remains hidden to the designers’ eyes. We first define the composition and decomposition operations and individually exemplify them on some small examples. We then demonstrate how they can be used to visually design new interfaces for a real-world case study where variations of the context of use induce frequent recomposition of user interfaces. Finally, we describe how the operations are implemented in a dedicated interface builder supporting the aforementioned method.

Visual technologies have directly influenced the specification and implementation of virtual environments and the user interactions that can be supported. However, recent advances in haptic devices have facilitated new levels of virtual environment interaction by the development of environments where it is possible to touch and virtual objects. Such environments support a richer set of possible user interactions.

This paper explores haptic specification for virtual environment interaction. The aim is to provide a of interaction to enable analysis of usability requirements in an example haptic technology.

We study the variations in two dimensional (2D) pointing tasks on a traditional white board of a group of subjects by means of capturing their movement traces in an automatic way with the Mimio device. Such traces provide detailed insight in the variability of 2D pointing relevant for example for the design of computer vision based gestural interaction. This study provides experimental evidence that for medium large distances Fitts’ model, and Welfords and Shannons variants, continue to show a linear relationship between movement time (MT) and the index of difficulty (ID) with a high correlation for the ranges considered. The expected increased sensitivity to changes in ID for these larger distances are confirmed. Nearly all movements show three phases: a planning phase, a ballistic phase and an adjustment phase. Finally, we show that the arrival time at the target resembles a log-normal distribution.

We present a new technique for user interface prototyping, called mixed-fidelity prototyping. Mixed-fidelity prototyping combines and supports independent refinement of low-, medium-, and high-fidelity interface elements within a single prototype. Designers are able to investigate alternate, more innovative designs, and are able to elicit feedback from stakeholders without having to commit too early in the process. The approach encourages collaboration among a diverse group of stakeholders throughout the design process. For example, individuals who specialize in specific fidelities, such as high-fidelity components, are able to become involved earlier on in the process.

We developed a conceptual model called the Region Model and implemented a proof-of-concept system called ProtoMixer. We then demonstrated the mixed-fidelity approach by using ProtoMixer to design an example application.

One of the main activities in User Centred Design (UCD) is prototype evaluation, which is traditionally performed by means of an Evaluation Stage that looks for the redefinition of the prototype requirements, involving quantitative and qualitative usability testing techniques. This paper describes a new approach in which the traditional methodology for performing the Evaluation Stage under UCD is embedded in a framework with capabilities for mining association rules. This allows to minimise the impact of the interpretation bias of the evaluation team when analysing ambiguous user statements in natural language.

This paper describes a platform for the user-centred design and evaluation of adaptive, context-aware services in the wireless, mobile and pervasive computing markets. It focuses on evaluating the user interactions with context-aware adaptive systems while synchronising the control of the environmental context that drives adaptivity and the user’s perception of that environment. The platform uses a 3D virtual reality simulation to present the environment to the user and to drive the generation of simulated environmental context. The platform thereby delivers repeatable, instrumented, context-dependent evaluations of adaptive services over a range of contexts. It aims to reduce development costs and facilitate the development of more effective, user-empowering services.

To design usable mobile applications, exploiting context changes is of vital importance. The rapid context changes in a mobile setting cause the need for flexible and adaptive user interfaces that are multitasking and possibly exploiting multiple modalities. Implementing adaptive user interfaces requires expensive application-specific solutions. Reuse of this type of solutions is difficult or impossible. To make it viable to implement adaptive user interfaces for a broader range of applications, there is both a need for new architecture and middleware, and ways of constructing applications. In this paper, we show how a combination of a patterns-based modelling language using compound user interface components and mapping rules as building blocks, and a generic adaptive architecture based on components with ports and utility functions for finding the optimal configuration in a given situation, facilitates implementation of applications with adaptive user interfaces. First we briefly present our modelling approach, and the adaptive architecture including the generic middleware exploiting architecture models at runtime. With this as a background we show how the presented modelling approach may be combined with the adaptive architecture to facilitate model-based user interface adaptation. Finally, we compare our approach with other approaches for realizing adaptive user interfaces, and we give some conclusions and directions for future research.

The development of video games is a complex software engineering activity bringing together large multidisciplinary teams under stringent constraints. While much has been written about how to develop video games, there has been as yet little attempt to view video game development from a quality perspective, attempting to enumerate the quality attributes that must be satisfied by game implementations, and to relate implementation techniques to those quality attributes. In this paper, we discuss desired quality attributes of 3D computer games, and we use the development of our own game to illustrate architectural tactics that help achieve these desired qualities.