Component-based development of adaptive user interfaces

Abstract

Modern User Interfaces (UIs) are increasingly expected to be plastic in the sense that they retain a constant level of usability, even when subjected to context changes at runtime. Adaptive UIs (AUIs) have been promoted as a solution for context variability due to their ability to automatically adapt to the context-of-use at runtime. However, development of AUIs is a complex task as different aspects such as context monitoring and UI adaptation have to be supported. In previous work, model-driven engineering approaches were proposed to support the development of AUIs in a systematic and efficient manner. However, existing model-driven development approaches for AUIs face challenges regarding flexibility, reusability, and compatibility to de facto standard UI frameworks like Angular, which hinder their industry-wide usage and adoption in practice. To address this problem and explore an alternative approach, we propose a component-based development framework for AUIs (CoBAUI). CoBAUI defines a modular framework for supporting the development of AUIs and consists of various components to cover aspects like context monitoring and UI adaptation at widget level. The CoBAUI framework was implemented based on Angular and aims to support the development of AUIs through highly reusable and flexible components. We demonstrate the benefit of our CoBAUI framework based on a case study of an AUI for a library web application.