Research On Adaptive User Interface Design For Mobile Device Based On Context-Awareness

It is important to take account of the user interface design for the mobile devices, as the design determines the ease for use, good user experience and even the whole product. However, the most mobile user interfaces currently show lack of friendships with users because of the mobility, limitations of input, output, and computing ability. Hence, to improve the users' performances and satisfactions, it need to import a new way of human-computer interaction for mobile user interface, which could has a good usability.This paper proposes the approaches for design the adaptive mobile user interface based on context awareness, and the main contents of research have been shown as follows:1. We explored the category of mobile contexts and their data collections and processes for the awareness, and produced the framework for contexts based on activity theory. Contexts were mapped with factors from activity to describe the mobile interactions. Then we analyzed the contexts' effects in the different hierarchies of activity model and the different kinds of interactions.2. Most related works ignored the base of users need for adaptive mobile user interface, and had no design principles. Hence we did research on the user interface design principles which took account of distributed recognition, user experience, and usability and so on. We also proposed adaption map and heuristic matrix as the tools for the principles' analysis, which aimed to make decisions about when and how to trigger the adaptions, and how to make balance for controlling during the adaption process between users and systems. Theses could give the guide for the design in practice.3. For the imperfection and uncertainty of the mobile context information, we modeled the context driven user interface design knowledge representation system based on rough sets. The decision tables' condition attributions in the knowledge systems could be reducted, and it made the adaption rules' inference and related user interface design knowledge simply, which could be applied into the design practices easily.4. Then, we analyzed the interaction patterns and information visualizations for mobile user interface, and proposed the design technology to support the variants and dynamic navigation structures for the adaption. Besides, the instance of how to design the adaptive icons based on shape grammar and vertical pushed menus were described.5. At last, we took the cell phone for the example to describe the design process for the mobile adaptive user interface, such as the user need analysis, interaction design included. A prototype was introduced which had the adaptive contact lists and indication icons for adaptive illumination adjusting. And the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed design approaches in this paper were illustrated through the usability evaluations in the end, which combined the both lab studies and fields interviews, especially including questionnaires and eye-tracking.