Design Adaptable and Adaptive User Interfaces: A Method to Manage the Information

Designing a multi-user adaptive interface means designing for diversity in end-users and contexts of use, and implies making alternative design decisions, at various levels of the interaction project, inherently leading to diversity in the final design outcomes. Nowadays Adaptive User Interfaces (AUIs) is becoming one of the major objectives addressed by Human Computer Interaction research. The present study provides an overview about the methods currently applied to the definition and development of AUIs. In order to study and develop adaptive user interfaces with the purpose to guarantee socialization, safety and environmental sustainability in a domestic day-by-day living space, a new method of holistic and adaptive user interface is proposed to support the modeling of information related to the user and the context of the interaction. In order to generate the user profiles, subjects older than 40 years with different levels of technology affinity will be considered. These prototypes will be tested through different use cases in the context of smart home environments. The final goal is to produce smart objects and consumer goods able to automatically satisfy the different skills, abilities, needs and human preferences, in an environment where each solutions address different individuals.