Modeling user-system data exchange to design adaptive interfaces

The wide spread of mobile devices in the consumer market has posed a number of new issues in the design of internet applications and their user interfaces. In particular, applications need to adapt their interaction modalities to different portable devices, like cellular phones and handhelds. In this paper we address the problem of defining models and techniques for designing internet based applications that automatically adapt to different mobile devices. First, we define a formal model that allows for specifying the interaction in a way that is abstract enough to be decoupled from the presentation layer, which is to be adapted to different contexts. The model is mainly based on the idea of describing the user interaction in terms of elementary actions, (Atomic Interaction Units, AIU ) that capture the user interaction through the data s/he exchanges with the system. Then, we provide a formal device characterization showing how to effectively implements the AIUs in a multidevice context.