User Interface User Interface Migration Based on the Use of Logical Descriptions

Nowadays people are ever more exposed to ubiquitous environments, which are characterized by the availability of various interactive devices with different interaction resources. Thus, the possibility to opportunistically exploit the resources that such contexts offer (e.g., moving from stationary to mobile devices) is invaluable for providing an effective interaction experience to the user. In this context, interactive migratory user interfaces offer the added value of enabling users to migrate across various types of devices while preserving the task continuity. This implies that there should be the possibility to select a target device and activate on it a version of the user interface adapted to its features with the same state as on the source device. The state of a user interface includes the values entered or selected by the user, the content, the cookies, etc. Various types of migration can be identified depending on the number of source and target devices or whether the entire user interface or only a part of it migrates. In particular, partial migration means moving only a portion of the interactive application (namely: some components) to another device in order to better exploit its interactive resources. The typical scenario is a user who is interacting with a desktop or large screen system and then for some reason has to leave, but wants to continue the interaction through a mobile device with only a part of the application. This can be either because of its complexity or because of some limitations in the mobile device (e.g. iPhones do not support Flash applications). This is particularly important with mashup-like applications, which tend to be particularly complex and made up of various perceivable components. Model-based approaches (see for example Eisenstein et al. 2001; Paternò et al. 2009a) have shown good potential in managing the complexity of multi-device environments. In such approaches there is usually a distinction between abstract (modality independent) and concrete (modality dependent) logical descriptions, Chapter 5 User Interface Migration Based on the Use of Logical Descriptions