Weighting task procedure for zoomable task hierarchy modeling of rich internet applications

  • Authors:

  • Francisco J. Martínez-Ruiz;Jean Vanderdonckt;Jaime Muñoz

  • Affiliations:

  • Belgian Lab. of Computer-Human Interaction, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Belgian Lab. of Computer-Human Interaction, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, México

  • Venue:
  • TAMODIA'09 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Task Models and Diagrams for User Interface Design
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Zoomable user interfaces are more attractive because they offer the possibility to present information and to support actions according to a "focus+context" method: while a context of use is preserved or presented in a more compact way, the focus can be achieved on some part of the information and actions, enabling the end user to focus on one part at a time. While this interaction technique can be straightforwardly applied for manipulating objects of the same type (e.g., cells in a spreadsheet or appointments in a calendar), it is less obvious how to present interactive tasks of an information system where tasks may involve very different amount and types of information and actions. For this purpose, this paper introduces a metric based on a task model in order to decide what portion of a task model should lead to a particular user interface container, group, or fragment, while preserving the task structure. Each branch of the task model is assigned to a weight that will lead to such a container, group, or fragment depending on parameters computed on variables belonging to the context of use. In this way, not only the task structure is preserved, but also the decomposition of the user interface into elements depends on the context of use, particularly the constraints imposed by the computing platform.