Designing Adaptive Mobile Applications: Abstract Components and Composite Behaviors

Abstract

Current commercial software frameworks for the development of mobile applications targeted at heterogeneous devices are based on a paradigm of abstract user interface components (or 'controls') that change its rendering depending on device characteristics. In this paper, we approach the problem of extending that paradigm to handle adaptiveness to user models for the purpose of improving usability. A generic approach along with its concrete realization on ASP.NET technology is described. The approach is centered on the notion of componentized adaptive behaviors, that can be easily added to user controls by designers. These components can also be chained to come up with more complex behaviors. In addition, some experiences on the automatic, rule-based dynamic addition of such behaviors to concrete controls based on usage data are described.