Context: Ambiant intelligence
The user is mobile; any physical object may serve as interaction resources; services may appear and disappear dynamically; user's goals may emerge opportunistically. As a result, User Interfaces (UIs) can not be produced at design time anymore.
Problem: Variability of the specifications
UIs must be generated dynamically so that to cope with unforeseen contexts of use. As a result, there is a shift in the development process: the system under study is no more the UI the end-user interacts with, but the Supra-UI (Supra stands for Supervizing UI) in charge of sensing the current context of use, and of adapting the UI accordingly so that to ensute the UI quality at any time of interaction.
Topic: Quality of UIs
Quality is studied from different perspectives: software quality, and ergonomic quality for instance. The Quality Metamodel I am co-author of (published at ACM EICS'11) aims at being comprehensive.
Goals: Quality of life for the end-users; Quality studio for the developpers
My goal is to provide models, methods and tools for supporting the development of innovative, high quality UIs all over the interaction.
Expected results: a theory of adaptation for predicting and explaining the co-evolution between the system, the end-user and his/her surroundings (platform, environment); a studio for supporting the development of innovative, high quality UIs.
Research axes: Quality by design, adaptation, reuse and reparation
- Quality by design: Generated UIs are simplistic, made of basic widgets (e.g., input fields, radio buttons), and so do not support advanced interaction features as promoted in ambiant intelligence. I study creativity (D. Masson's PhD and Z. Abu-Aished's Master 2 research) so that to go beyond simplistic UIs in model driven engineering of UIs. I also study flexibility so that to comply with the different practices in UIs development (Eric Ceret's PhD).
- Quality by adaptation: Plasticity refers to the capacity of a UI to withstand variations of the context of use (user, platform, environment) while preserving user-centered properties. Adaptation is either a remolding (e.g., replacing an image with a text) or a UI redistribution among the set of available platforms (e.g., migrating the inputs to a mobile device). I now enlarge the study by considering social networks (Fatoumata Camara's PhD) and cloud computing (Laure Martins Baltar's PhD).
- Quality by reuse: Sotware composition is one of the grand challenges. I explore planning for supporting dynamic composition of UIs (Cyrille Martin's PhD).
- Quality by reparation: As universal quality is utopic, I explore self explanative UIs so that to provide the end-users with the design rationale of the UI (Alfonso Garcia's PhD).