Designing distributed user interfaces for ambient intelligent environments using models and simulations

Abstract

There is a growing demand for design support to create interactive 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 methodology 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 these typical user interface models such as the task- and presentation-model to support interface design, we focus on user interfaces supporting situated task distributions and a visualization of context influences on deployed, possibly distributed, user interfaces. To enable this we introduce an environment model describing 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 visualization 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.