Strategies for Automated GUI Tailoring for Multiple Devices

When the same graphical user interface (GUI) is being used on multiple devices with different properties, usability problems arise, especially when GUI pages are too large for a (small) screen. Scrolling is a usual approach in such a situation, but it also depends on device properties. For desktop PCs used with a mouse, it is well-known that scrolling should be avoided. In contrast, for touch-based devices like tablet PCs or smartphones used with fingers, scrolling especially in vertical direction is widely used and accepted. So, providing several GUIs tailored for multiple devices is desirable but expensive, and it takes time. Automated GUI generation may help, when different GUIs can be generated from the same high-level interaction design model. This is still an issue, however, since usually adaptations to high-level models have to be made manually. Our approach just requires a device specification with a few parameters for automated GUI tailoring, which employs heuristic optimization techniques. Our fully implemented approach even offers different tailoring strategies for automated GUI generation.