Decision Oriented Programming in HCI: The Multi-Attribute Decision Language MADL

In Human Computer Interaction (HCI), the computer has to take many decisions to react in a way that human wants. As decisions in HCI are diverse, contradictory, and hard to measure it is hard to study and model them, e.g. finding a mapping from the users preferences to adaptions of the user interface. To ease these tasks, we developed MADL (Multi-Attribute Decision Language). This programming language, based on Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM), is designed to model and make hierarchical multi-attributive decisions and is based on the analysis of decisions and goals in HCI. It fosters respecting HCI specific characteristics in development, like uncertainty and risk, can be embedded easily in other applications and allows inclusion of and experimentation with different decision rules. User interface logic can also be modeled by non-programmers and more easily separated from the business logic. The applicability will been shown in three use cases.