SUI 2012 - 2nd International Workshop on Supportive User Interfaces

In order to improve the interaction control and intelligibility, end-user applications are supplemented with Supportive User Interfaces (SUI), like meta-UIs, mega-UIs, helping or configuration wizards. These additional UIs support the user by providing her/him with information about the available functionalities, the context of use, or the performed adaptations. Such UIs allow the user to supervise and modify the application interactive behavior according to her/his needs.
Given the rising complexity of interactive systems, supportive UIs are highly desirable. However, there is currently no common understanding of types and roles of supportive UIs. Enabling concepts and definitions underlying the engineering of such UIs are also missing. In order to fill this gap, the workshop seeks a discussion with a broad audience of researchers, who have experience with the design and development of supportive UIs.
Motivation and Goals
Enabling technologies make it possible to create more and more complex systems in terms of functional core, new interaction techniques and context-of-use dynamics. Coming along with systems complexity, the users require a better understanding and control of their applications [6].
In contrast to "pervasive intelligibility" research [5], this workshop focus on the design and engineering of UIs to foster intelligibility and control. UI intelligibility has been approached from different perspectives. The concept of "Meta-UI" has been introduced as a metaphorical UI to control and evaluate the state of interactive ambient spaces [1]. Other works focus on self-explanatory UIs, and make it possible for the end-user to understand the design of the user interface [4], or to control the media distribution and the component discovery [3].
Gathering these many approaches into a shared definition has been the main outcome of last year discussions. Specifically, Supportive UIs (SUI) exchange information about an interactive system with the user, and/or enable its modification, with the goal of improving the effectiveness and quality of the user's interaction with that system. Following this definition, taxonomies derived from collaborative and self-explainable UIs enable SUI categorization. Several SUI approaches, either focused on feature control, users' adaptation, or context management have also been introduced [7].
In a broader context, this second workshop forwards last year research agenda and aims to explore how to integrate supportive UIs into development processes and/or model-based development.
Topics of interest
The overall goals and questioning of the workshop are to:
Further elicit the dimensions of supportive UIs through a taxonomy that would cover both the abstraction and presentation of supportive UIs;
Discuss design, implementation and evaluation methodology through questions such as:
Design: how do SUIs impact the functionalities and interaction of the application? Does SUI design fit into user centered design approaches?
Implementation: how to weave SUIs into the application code? Can model driven engineering pave the way?
Evaluation: how SUIs can be evaluated with or without respect to the “core” UIs ?
Identify the key research stakeholders for further research.
The relevance of the workshop is two-fold: first, to improve the quality of UIs, and to reconcile research areas (e.g.: model driven engineering, end-user programming). To that end, we solicit papers addressing one or more of these issues.
Important dates
Paper Submission: April 23, 2012
Notification of acceptance: May 7, 2012
Final paper due: May 21, 2012
Distribution of final papers: June 18, 2012
Workshop day: June 25, 2012
References
[1] Coutaz, J. Meta-User Interfaces for Ambient Spaces. In Proc. of the 5th Int. Ws. on Task Models and Diagrams for Users Interface Design: TAMODIA 2006, pp 1-15, Coninx, K., Luyten, K. and Schneider, K. A. (eds.), Springer LNCS 4385. Hasselt, Belgium, October 23-24, 2006.
[2] Sottet, J-S., Calvary, G., Favre, J-M. and Coutaz, J. Megamodeling and Metamodel-Driven Engineering for Plastic User Interfaces: MEGA-UI. In Human-Centered Software Engineering, pp 173-200, Seffah, A., Vanderdonckt, J. and Desmarais, M. C. (eds.), Springer Human-Computer Interaction Series. 2009.
[3] Seifried, T., Haller, M., Scott, S. D., Perteneder, F. Rendl, C., Sakamoto, D. and Inami, M. CRISTAL. Design and implementation of a remote control system based on multi-touch system. In Proc. of the 4th Int. Conf. on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces: Tabletops 2009. ACM. Banff, Canada, November 23-25, 2009.
[4] Garcia Frey, A., Calvary, G. and Dupuy-Chessa, S. Xplain: an editor for building self-explanatory user interfaces by model-driven engineering. In Proc. of the 2nd Int. Symp. on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems: EICS 2010, pp 41-46, ACM. Berlin, Germany, June 19-23, 2010.
[5] Vermeulen, J., Lim, B. Y. and Kawsar, F. Proc. of the Int. Ws. on Intelligibility and Control in Pervasive Computing. Held in conjunction with the 9th Int. Conf. on Pervasive Computing : Pervasive 2011. St Francisco, CA, USA, June 12-15, 2011.
[6] Dix, A. Opening the Box, Meta-level Interfaces Needs and Solutions. In Proc. of the 1st Int. Ws. on Supportive User Interfaces: SUI 2011, pp 13-16, Demeure, A., Lehman, G., Petit, M., Calvary, G. (Eds.), CEUR-WS.org, Vol-818. Pisa, Italy, June 13, 2011.
[7] Demeure, A., Lehman, G., Petit, M., Calvary, G. Proc. of the 1st Int. Ws. on Supportive User Interfaces: SUI 2011, Held in conjunction with the 3rd Int. Symp. on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems: EICS 2011, 41 pages, CEUR-WS.org, Vol-818. Pisa, Italy, June 13, 2011.