Ravi Pandya
ravi@iecommerce.com
www.iecommerce.com
+1 425 417 4180
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ABOUT ME

Ravi Pandya
Architect
Technical Strategy Incubation
Microsoft
ravip at microsoft.com

03-	Microsoft
00-02	Covalent
97-00	EverythingOffice
96-97	Jango
93-96	NetManage
89-93	Xanadu
88-89	Hypercube
84,85	Xerox PARC
83-89	University of Toronto, Math
86-87	George Brown College, Dance
95-	Foresight Institute
97-	Institute for Molecular Manufacturing

DISCLAIMER

The opinions expressed here are purely my own, and do not reflect the policy of my employer.

Adaptive user interfaces

Supple: automatically generating user interfaces, by Krzysztof Gajos and Dan Weld
This shows a promising approach to something that is going to become increasingly important as people start using different kinds of devices to access their applications - phones, TVs, PCs, dedicated devices, etc. They treat interface construction as an optimization problem. Given a set of tasks and associated model elements, along with a set of available user interface elements, Supple will generate a user interface. It takes into account effort metrics for the different elements and transitions so that it can generate different widget selections for phones, touch screens, and WIMP interfaces. Furthermore, it can include statistical information from user activity traces to optimize the interface for more frequent tasks. They actually did comparative studies with human designers (students who had taken an HCI course), and Supple did about as well. Supple isn't going to run the Excel or Photoshop UI anytime soon, but it's not far from being useful for line-of-business applications and third-tier websites, most of which have atrocious usability. If Microsoft IT started using this I'd applaud - right now, I cringe every time I fill out an expense report or renew my parking permit. (On further thought, maybe it's not so far from being useful for Office - I bet the new Office UI redesign produced much of the task analysis that Supple would need...)

05:48 #