Context-Aware Generation of User Interface Containers for Mobile Devices

The world of the mobile devices involves restrictive features. Multiple efforts have been done to define the user interface. Here, it is combined a neutral description of the UI with a semantic recovery of information. The focus of this paper is the generation of the containment structure based on the context of the application. The process includes three main tasks: first a fixed division of the neutral definition of the UI (a task tree), then heuristic rules based on the vicinity are applied and finally a set of container patterns is provided to polish the UI. Alternative configurations are delivered and weighted. Since multiple metrics has been proposed a comparison of them was delivered. The results of the comparative analysis suggest that some metrics, although more sophisticated and fine-grained, do not necessarily improve significantly the quality of determining user interface containers, therefore stemming for simple, yet efficient, metrics used to reach a threshold. Finally, a set of plausible UIs is delivered.