Towards integrated design of context-sensitive interactive systems

Programs on mobile (and embedded) devices can greatly benefit from the integration of context information to create a more pleasant user experience. This is only the case when it supports and not decreases the performance of the user. It is therefore equally important to describe context as to integrate the context specification in the design of (user interfaces for) interactive systems. In this paper, we discuss the different influences that context can have on a user interface and we introduce a graphical notation that allows specification of a large subset of those influences. The approach builds on the foundations of model-based user interface design and uses UML 2.0, a broadly accepted notation in software engineering, increasing the chances of good comprehension of the models and opening the door for a similar approach for the integration of context in system design. Extensions using stereotypes allow specific notations to be used within standard UML-tools.