Pierre Akiki

Adaptive User Interfaces

Modern businesses rely heavily on enterprise software applications for automating their business processes. The dependency on these applications drives business owners to request even more features from the software suppliers. It places a heavy pressure on suppliers to provide the best possible software quality, without increasing the cost. The orientation towards generic enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, etc.) is also being challenged by the variation of demands amongst businesses and users. Among various components of an enterprise system, the user interface (UI) layer is considered highly important since it interfaces users to the software system. Employees, with different roles in the enterprise, could require a variable user interface feature-set and layout for the same business activity. Some software companies chose to build multiple UIs for the same functionality due to variable user needs. Yet, in certain situations, the scope of variability is unknown at design time or it is costly to develop multiple UI versions manually.

ASAP

The Cedar Platform

Cedar is a platform targeting the development of adaptive user interfaces for enterprise applications, using a model based approach. Cedar’s primary aim is user interface simplification, which comprises role-based feature-set minimization and layout optimization. Enterprise software applications include many scenarios, where users with different roles require variable versions of the same user interface. Catering to this variability, by providing multiple user interface versions, would enhance usability.

The Cedar Architecture serves as a reference for developing adaptive enterprise application user interfaces based on interpreted runtime models. We developed a generic service-oriented implementation of the Cedar Architecture components, which can be consumed through APIs from different technologies, for devising adaptive model-driven user interfaces.

Cedar Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for supporting the development of adaptive model-driven enterprise applications by following the Cedar Architecture.

Cedar Studio supports visual design tools for: Goal Models, Task Models, Domain Models, Abstract UI (AUI) Models, Concrete UI (CUI) Models, and Adaptive Behavior Workflows.

Cedar Studio also supports a combination of visual design and code editing tools for: Task Role Assignments, RBUIS Rules, Model Constraints, and Dynamic Scripts.

Furthremore, this tool supports automatic generation and synchronization between the various levels of abstraction (Task Model, AUI, and CUI) with the possibility to make manual changes at any of these levels.

The Role-Based User Interface Simplification (RBUIS) mechanism is based on the Cedar Architecture and includes both feature-set minimization and layout optimization supported by Cedar Studio.

Project Videos

Engineering Adaptive UIs for Enterprise Applications

This video shows a virtual scenario on role-based variability in enterprise application user interfaces. Afterwards, the Cedar Studio IDE is demonstrated by developing an example adaptive "Sales Invoice" user interface and applying our Role-Based User Interface Simplification (RBUIS) mechanism to it in order to cater for the variable user needs.

Integrating Adaptive UIs into Enterprise Applications

This video demonstrates how RBUIS can be used for empowering existing enterprise applications with adaptive user interface capabilities. The Apache Open for Business (OFBiz) enterprise automation system is used as a test-case.

Cedar Studio - Role-Based UI Simplification

This video briefly demonstrates Cedar Studio by developing an example adaptive "Item Maintenance" user interface and applying our Role-Based User Interface Simplification (RBUIS) mechanism to it.

Cedar Studio - Multi-Aspect Trade-Off

This video gives a brief overview of Cedar Studio and demonstrates examples of adaptive user interfaces with multi-aspect trade-off. The demonstrated examples include a desktop "Bank Account" UI and a "Business Partners" UI on a mobile phone.

This video briefly demonstrates Cedar Studio by developing an example adaptive "Item Maintenance" user interface and applying our Role-Based User Interface Simplification (RBUIS) mechanism to it.

Project Publications