Title: Temporality-based user interface design approaches for desktop and small screen environment

Authors: M. Kumara Swamy; P. Krishna Reddy; R. Uday Kiran; M. Venugopal Reddy

Addresses: Centre for Data Engineering, International Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad 500032, India. ' Centre for Data Engineering, International Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad 500032, India. ' Centre for Data Engineering, International Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad 500032, India. ' Centre for Data Engineering, International Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad 500032, India

Abstract: User interface (UI) forms are used to enter data in information systems. The improper UI increases navigational burden, data entry errors and reduces the efficiency of the user. Further, in small screen environments, it is difficult to display full interface on a single screen due to the limitation of small screen. Research efforts are going on to investigate the improved user interface methods for desktop and small screen environments. Normally, context-based approach is followed to design user interfaces. In this approach, the input attributes are divided into several contexts based on certain criteria and UI form is designed for each context. We have exploited the fact that several attributes in the UI form may not receive values only during certain time period. We term this as 'temporality' property of an attribute. In this paper, we propose a methodology to improve UI for desktop environments by exploiting the notion of 'temporality' property of attribute. Further, we also propose an improved UI design methodology by extending notion of temporality to interface tailoring methods for small screens. The experiment results on a real dataset show that the proposed method improves the performance as compared to existing approaches.

Keywords: temporality; form-based user interfaces; context-aware computing; context-based approach; interface tailoring; mobile interface forms; small screens; navigational burden; user interfaces; UIs; interface design; desktop screens.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2012.046180

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2012 Vol.7 No.1, pp.52 - 64

Published online: 22 Sep 2014 *

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