The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

It is sometimes required to run the same application program on different platforms, from smartphones to PC's. The application may have to employ different User Interfaces (UI's) on different platforms, e.g. a UI designed for a large PC screen may not fit into the small screen of a smartphone. A different version of the application may therefore be needed for each platform kind. Kantorowitz and Lyakas introduced the use of platform-independent semantic user interfaces. As a result, the same single version of the application is employed on all the different platforms. For each platform, the system provides a means for converting the semantic UI into a concrete, real life UI. This work addresses a novel method for conversion of the semantic UI into a platform-specific concrete UI by using a customizable set of rules. The proposed method is application-independent and may therefore be employed for generating of the concrete UI of different applications. Devising a detailed concrete UI from a concise, abstract semantic UI, is a hard task with many possible solutions. At our disposal are, however, libraries of Interaction Design Patterns (IDP's). An IDP is an expert recommendation of the UI to be employed in a particular situation. The IDP's promote the construction of UI with satisfactory usability and aesthetics. This research investigates how to implement IDP's as rules that can be applied when converting semantic UI's into concrete UI's, and what further information may be needed for this conversion.