Variability Analysis: From Requirements Engineering Towards Interaction Design

Abstract

Much research has been devoted to adaptable and adaptive systems over a decade, with the aim to improve user-system interaction. Despite these efforts, we still lack a systematic approach to deal with variations in users, user goals, and contexts of use. In this paper, we revise some previous work on a language-based variability analysis process, propose a structure for the solution space of adaptable and adaptive systems, and illustrate how design decisions on how to cope with variability can be made in this approach.

Using Cases in Variability Analysis to Promote the Design of Flexible, Adaptable and Adaptive Systems

“…This paper showed how variability analysis [20,21] can be an important resource for HCI designers to decide on how to deal with variations both at design and at interaction time. In order to investigate the possible variations, two tasks are performed: user requests expansion by adding relevant cases to the user request structure, and sign substitution, exploring ontological relations among signs.…”

“…The variability analysis process under investigation comprises the following steps [20]: 1. Elicit information about domain, user goals, users, context of use and system (possible hardware and infrastructure).…”

“…An important difference between the approach in [20,21] and LEL is related to the verb signs. In LEL, verb signs (e.g.…”

“…Following research in human-computer interaction (HCI), this paper explores how an approach to requirements variability analysis can help to design alternative ways to achieve a certain goal during interaction time [20]. Instead of deciding beforehand which alternative will be available to the users and design a fixed system, a few alternatives will be present in the product, from which the users will be able to choose (i.e., flexible [17] and adaptable systems [14]) or the system will compute as suitable for the current context of use (i.e.…”

“…This paper shows how a set of adaptation-oriented questions can help map the problem space resulting from the language-based variability analysis approach proposed in [20,21,21] onto HCI design solutions. It is organized as follows: the next section describes the adopted variability analysis approach.…”