Adaptive User Interfaces

Adaptive User Interfaces

Adaptive user interfaces are ones that can run on multiple platforms, have diverse multiple users, have a user performing diverse multiple roles/tasks at different times, or all of these, and the interface adapts to provide a best-fit interface to the user vs. have several hard-coded user interfaces for each user/role/task/device combination. I and several students and colleagues have invented several novel approaches to supporting such interfaces. We have developed several proof of concept architectures to realise these. We have also developed some design tools to aid in the construction of such interfaces. While I am not currently not doing much work in this area I do hope to get back to it again very soon.

Representative Funding

  • FRST RFI 2007 - 2007-2012 - J Grundy, J Hosking, RJ Noble, E Tempero, E Mendes, N Churcher, S MacDonnell, J Dietrich, $4,500,000 for 5.75 years, Software Process and Product Improvement

  • FRST RFI 2002 - 2002 - 2005 - J Grundy, J Hosking, R Amor, E Mendes, E Tempero, RJ Noble, R Biddle, $2,300,000 for 5 years, Domain-specific software tools

Representative Projects and Publications

Adaptive, Component-based UIs

Preliminary work in this area supporting composable user interfaces using component technology with some basic adaptive support to different users, tasks and (very limited ways) devices.

  • Grundy, J.C., Mugridge, W.B., Hosking, J.G., Apperley, M.D., Tool integration, collaboration and user interaction issues in component-based software architectures, In Proceedings of TOOLS Pacific'98, Melbourne, Australia, 24-26 Nov, IEEE CS Press. PDF

  • Grundy, J.C. Engineering component-based, user-configurable collaborative editing systems, Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction, Chatty, S. and Dewan, P. Eds, February 1999, Kluwer Academic Publishers. PDF

  • Grundy, J.C. and Hosking, J.G. Developing Adaptable User Interfaces for Component-based Systems, Interacting with Computers, vol. 14, no. 3, March 2002, Elsevier, pp. 175-194. PDF

Adaptive multi-device UIs for web and mobile applications

Our second work in this area, providing a way to engineer web pages to adapt to different requesting devices and then to provide basic design tool support for these interfaces.

  • Grundy, J.C. and Zou, W. Building multi-device, adaptive thin-client web user interfaces with Extended Java Server Pages, In Cross-Platform and Multi-device User Interfaces, Wiley, 2003. PDF

  • Grundy, J.C. and Jin, W. Experiences developing a thin-client, multi-device travel planning application, in Proceedings of 2002 New Zealand Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, July 12-13, Hamilton, New Zealand. PDF

  • Grundy, J.C. and Yang, B. An environment for developing adaptive, multi-device user interfaces, In Proceedings of the 4th Australasian Conference on User Interfaces, Adelaide, Australia, February 3-7 2003.PDF

  • Grundy, J.C., Wang, X. and Hosking, J.G. Building Multi-Device, Component-Based, Thin-Client Groupware: Issues and Experience, In Proceedings of the 2002 Australasian User Interface Conference, Melbourne, Australia. PDF.

  • Grundy, J.C. and Zou, W. An architecture for building multi-device thin-client web user interfaces, In Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, Toronto, Canada, May 29-31 2002, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. PDF

Component-based Groupware

Supporting composition of interfaces and very dynamic adaptation to devices, users, roles, tasks and other components detected at run-time.

  • Grundy, J.C. and Hosking, J.G. Engineering plug-in software components to support collaborative work, Software - Practice and Experience, Vol. 32, No. 10, August 2002, Wiley, 983-1013. PDF.

  • Mehra, A., Grundy, J.C. and Hosking, J.G. A generic approach to supporting diagram differencing and merging for collaborative design, In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Long Beach, California, Nov 7-11 2005, IEEE Press, pp. 204-213.PDF

  • Mehra, A., Grundy, J.C. and Hosking, J.G., Adding Group Awareness to Design Tools Using a Plug-in, Web Service-based Approach, In Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Collaborative Editing Systems, CSCW 2004, Chicago, November 6, 2004. PDF

Web and mobile-based diagramming tools

We developed several platforms to realise thin-client diagram editors. Initially this was GIF images with interaction map, then was SVG and JavaScript, and then Flash-based via OpenLaszlo.

  • Grundy, J.C., Hosking, J.G., Cao, S., Zhao, D., Zhu, N., Tempero, E. and Stoeckle, H. Experiences developing architectures for realising thin-client diagram editing tools, Software – Practice and Experience, vol. 37, no.12, Wiley, October 2007, pp. 1245-1283.PDF

  • Zhao, D., Grundy, J.C. and Hosking, J.G. Generating mobile device user interfaces for diagram-based modelling tools, In Proceedings of the 2006 Australasian User Interface Conference, Hobart, Australia, January 2006. PDF

  • Ip, T., Lomberg, K., Grundy, J.C. and Hosking, J.G. Realising Web Diagramming Applications with OpenLaszlo and Eclipse, Technical Report, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Auckland, New Zealand, 2009. PDF