Models at Run-time for Sustaining User Interface Plasticity

In the vision of ubiquitous computing, users are imagined as evolving in various, changing and not always foreseeable environments, in which platforms may arrive and disappear in an opportunistic manner. As a result, there is a need for User Interfaces (UI) to adapt to their context of use (<User, Platform, Environment>) while preserving usability. This capacity of UIs is called Plasticity. In a forward engineering approach, UIs are designed step by step starting from domainbased descriptions (user’s tasks and concepts) t o code. It is now well understood that plasticity may impact UIs at any level of abstraction. This calls for keeping the UIs design rationale alive at runtime. As models are practiced since a long time in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), this paper investigates to which extent Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is relevant for plasticity. UIs are designed as a net of models that define different perspectives on a same UI (user’s task, domain, concepts, widgets, etc.). The net is alive at run-time and transformed when the context of use changes. Transformations are performed with respect t o usability. This paper sketches the vision on a small running case study. It highlights a set of strengths and doubts that give rise to many perspectives.