Tutorials

Exploring Design Alternatives for Automated Web GUI Generation from Discourse Models

Author / Presenter: Hermann Kaindl. WU Wien, Vienna, Austria
Abstract: Interaction design is considered important for achieving usable Web user interfaces. Communicative acts as abstractions from speech acts can model basic building blocks (‘atoms’) of communication, like a question or an answer. When, e.g., a question and an answer are glued together as a so-called adjacency pair, a simple ‘molecule’ of a dialogue is modeled. Deliberately complex discourse structures can be modeled using relations from Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The content of a communicative act can refer to ontologies of the domain of discourse. Taking all this together, we created a new discourse metamodel that specifies what discourse models may look like. Such discourse models can specify an interaction design. This tutorial demonstrates how such an interaction design can be used for automated Web user-interface generation. Based on AI optimization techniques, the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are automatically generated and tailored to a device such as a smartphone according to a given device specification. Our approach, in contrast to others, can explore alternatives in the design space of GUIs. We present a user story about this theme using our approach, which also includes employing unique customization techniques to address usability.
Duration: 3 hours