Capricorn - an intelligent user interface for mobile widgets

Widgets are embeddable objects that provide easy and ubiquitous access to dynamic information sources, e.g., weather, news or TV program information. Interactions with widgets take place through a so-called widget engine, which is a specialized client-side runtime component that also provides functionalities for managing widgets. As the number of supported widgets increases, managing widgets becomes increasingly complex. For example, finding relevant or interesting widgets becomes difficult and the user interface easily gets cluttered with irrelevant widgets. In addition, interacting with information sources can be cumbersome, especially on mobile platforms. In order to facilitate widget management and interactions, we have developed Capricorn, an intelligent user interface that integrates adaptive navigation techniques into a widget engine. This paper describes the main functionalities of Capricorn and presents the results of a usability evaluation that measured user satisfaction and compared how user satisfaction varies between desktop and mobile platforms.