Towards an Evolution Model for Supporting Plasticity of User Interfaces

The increasing proliferation of computational devices has introduced the need for applications to run on multiple platforms in different physical environments. Providing a user interface specially crafted for each context of use is extremely costly and may result in inconsistent behavior. As a result, user interfaces must now be capable of adapting to multiple sources of variation. Plasticity refers to the ability of a user interface to mould itself to a range of contexts of use, where a context of use is defined as a triple <user, platform, environment>. This poster focuses on the Evolution Model that specifies the reaction to perform in case of changes of context of use. It first presents the problem space of the reaction then proposes a model for specifying the adaptation.