Coninx: Context-sensitive User Interfaces for Ambient Environments

Abstract. There is a growing demand for design support to create in-teractive systems that are deployed in ambient intelligent environments. Unlike traditional interactive systems, the wide diversity of situations these type of user interfaces need to work in require tool-support that is close to the environment of the end-user on the one hand and provide a smooth integration with the application logic on the other hand. This paper shows how the Model-Based User Interface Development method-ology can be applied for ambient intelligent environments; we propose a task-centered approach towards the design of interactive systems by means of appropriate visualizations and simulations of different models. Besides the use of typical user interface models, such as the task- and presentation-model, we focus on user interfaces supporting situated task distributions and a visualization of context influences on deployed user interfaces. To enable this we introduce an environment model describ-ing the device configuration at particular moment in time. To support the user interface designer while creating these complex interfaces for ambient intelligent environments, we discuss tool support using a visual-ization of the environment together with simulations of the user interface configurations. We also show how the concepts presented in the paper can be integrated within Model-Driven Engineering, hereby narrowing the gap between HCI design and software engineering.