Adaptive Service InterfacesBill Karakostas

Acknowledgements

Most of the state of the art review reported here was carried out by the proposers of a European RTD proposal that must remain anonymous but to which I am indebted!

The Problem

Today’s Service Front-Ends (SFEs) are often designed with the assumption that they are going to be used in

• a single, static, predefined context of use. Such a context usually involves an able-bodied user who is using a typical set of input and output devices (e.g., a desktop / laptop computer) and who is sitting in a stable environment (e.g., home, office). Any deviation from this assumption (for instance, hand tremor due to aging or low vision for a user, switching from one device to another such as from a feature phone to a multi-touch smartphone, riding on the noisy environment of a jostling bus) may significantly hamper users’ effectiveness

• — not because of any inherent barrier to interaction, but because of a mismatch between the actual context(s) of use (and their evolution over time and space) and the static, predefined context of use.

What is ‘Context’

A definition of Context that has been largely used is provided by [Dey 2000]:

"Context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of entities (i.e. whether a person, place or object) that are considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and the application themselves. Context is typically the location, identity and state of people, groups and computational and physical objects."

While this definition is rather general, thus encompassing many aspects, it is not directly operational.

Context Sensitive SFEs

In contrast to these approaches, we argue that SFEs should be automatically adapted to better suit disparate and evolving contexts of use while involving the end user in two major ways:

• the user can intervene in the adaptation (e.g., by controlling, suggesting, accepting/rejecting adaptations, requesting better adaptations)

• and the system can learn from the user (e.g., by observation, by sensing, by machine learning).

• A context-sensitive SFE is a SFE that exhibits some capability to be aware of the context (context awareness) and to react to changes of this context in a continuous way.

• As a result SFEs will be adapted to a person’s devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities, thus improving people’s satisfaction and performance compared to traditional SFEs based on manually designed UIs.

Types of Adaptation

• Adaptation to the individual user, i.e. personalization:• − Reordering a set of menu options to promote those options which are

more likely to be of nterest for the end user according to her preferences or tastes

• − Zooming appropriately the UI in order to better support a user with sight impairments

• • Adaptation to different computing platforms:• − Graceful degradation to satisfy the restrictions imposed by a more limited

platform. For instance, from a desktop-based UI to a PDA-based UI.• − Reorganization of the UI to better fit the available input devices. For

example, increasing the size of widgets to better support touch screen based interaction.

• − Taking advantage of the availability of different modalities, enabling voice-based interaction if it is supported by the platform.

• • Adaptation to changes in the environment:• − The output modality changes to address the restrictions imposed by a

noisy environment.• − The UI focuses on critical data in a secure way when used in a stressing

environment.

The Similar Adaptation Space

The Similar Adaptation Space] for context-sensitive user interfaces resulted from the efforts of 33 members in 16 countries of the SIMILAR FP6 Network of Excellence on multimodal user interfaces. The problem space is structured according to the following dimensions:

• The means used for adaptation.• The UI component granularity representing the smallest UI units that can be

adapted by the way of these means.• The state recovery granularity after adaptation has occurred (from the

session level to the user’s last action).• The UI deployment (static or dynamic) as a way to characterize how much

adaptation has been predefined at design-time vs. computed at runtime.• The context coverage to denote the causes for adaptation with which the

system is able to cope.• The coverage of the technological spaces as a way to characterize the

degree of technical heterogeneity supported by the system.• The existence of a meta-UI to allow users to control and evaluate the

adaptation process.

The Similar Adaptation Space [Vanderdonckt 2007]

Example of Adaptive SFEs in a warehouse

© SAP

warehouse staff get a visual representation of the number and location of the objects ( (storage rack and box number) they are looking for. Furthermore, they receive direct feedback on the HMD in the case of wrong or missing parts. For smaller orders or single parts, users often move more efficiently without the large storage cart. In that case, they can read details about relevant components as well as their location on a GUI running on the user’s cell phone.

Thank you for listening!