A Layered Approach for Designing Multiple User Interfaces from Task and Domain Models.pdf

A Layered Approach for Designing Multiple User Interfaces from Task and Domain Models Elizabeth Furtado, Jo?o José Vasco Furtado, Quentin Limbourg*, Jean Vanderdonckt*, Wilker Bezerra Silva, Daniel William Tavares Rodrigues, and Leandro da Silva Taddeo Universidade de Fortaleza, NATI - Célula EAD - Fortaleza, BRBrazil {elizabet, vasco, wilker, danielw, taddeo}@unifor.br * Université catholique de Louvain, BCHI – B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) {limbourg,vanderdonckt}@isys.ucl.ac.be Abstract More frequently, design of user interfaces covers design issues related to multiple contexts of use where multiple stereotypes of users may carry out multiple tasks, possibly on multiple domains of interest. Existing development methods do not necessarily support developing such user interfaces as they do not factor out common parts between similar cases while putting aside uncommon parts that are specific to some user stereotypes. To address this need, a new development method is presented based on three layers: (i) a conceptual layer where a domain expert defines an ontology of concepts, relationships, and attributes of the domain of discourse, including user modeling; (ii) a logical layer where a designer specifies multiple models based on the previously defined ontology and its allowed rules; and (iii) a physical layer where a developer develops multiple user interfaces from the previously specified models with design alternatives depending on characteristics maintained in the user models. 1 Introduction Universal design (Savidis, Akoumianakis Stephanidis, 2001) adheres to a vision where user interfaces (UIs) of interactive applications are developed for the widest population of users in different contexts of use by taking into account differences such as preferences, cognitive style, language, culture, habits, conventions, and system experience. Universal design of UIs poses some difficulties due to the consideration of these multiple parameters depending on the