Multi-device user interface design mostly implies creating a suitable interface for each targeted device, using a diverse set of design tools and toolkits. This is a time consuming activity, concerning a lot of repetitive design actions without support for reusing this effort in later designs. In this pa- per, we propose D-Macs: a design tool that allows designers to record their design actions across devices, to share these actions with other designers and to replay their own design actions and those of others. D-Macs lowers the burden in multi-device user interface design and can reduce the neces- sity for manually repeating design actions.

As the variety in network service platforms and end user devices grows rapidly, content providers must constantly adapt their production system to support these new technologies. In this paper, we present a middleware platform for deploying highly interactive (television) applications over a diverse collection of networks and end user devices. As the user interface of such interactive applications may vary depending on the capabilities of the different target devices, our middleware uses UIML for the description of generic user interfaces. Our middleware platform also provides a pluggable support for new networks. A factor that highly complicates the design is the need for strict synchronization between an interactive application and video or audio data that is broadcasted. In order to support a maximum of functionality, downloadable application logic is used to provide the interactive services. As a test case, an evaluation setup was built, targeting both set-top boxes and mobile phones.

Due to the large amount of mobile devices that continue to appear on the consumer market, mobile user interface design becomes increasingly important. The major issue with many existing mobile user interface design approaches is the time and effort that is needed to deploy a user interface design to the target device. In order to address this issue, we propose the plug-and-design tool that relies on a continuous multi-device mouse pointer to design user interfaces directly on the mobile target device. This will shorten iteration time since designers can continuously test and validate each design action they take. Using our approach, designers can empirically learn the specialities of a target device which will help them while creating user interfaces for devices they are not familiar with.

Gedurende de laatste jaren steeg de populariteit van mobiele computers om de bezoekerservaring te verrijken en vonden deze apparaten hun weg naar musea en andere erfgoedinstellingen. De voordelen van het gebruik van mobiele computers zijn duidelijk: informatie kan op een dynamische manier via het toestel gepresenteerd worden, zonder dat de fysieke ruimte zelf erdoor wordt verstoord. Bovendien kan de presentatie op een multimediale manier gebeuren: een mobiele computer kan verscheidene media tonen, zoals foto's, audio- en videofragmenten, tekst, … Omdat de bezoeker op verschillende manieren met het toestel kan interageren, worden ook interactieve spelen mogelijk. De dynamiek en autonomie die met deze toestellen behaald kunnen worden, zorgen er bovendien voor dat gebruikers hun eigen tempo kunnen aanhouden en informatie kunnen verkrijgen die afgestemd is op het persoonlijk interesseprofel.

Current user-centred software engineering (UCSE) approaches provide many techniques to combine know-how available in multidisciplinary teams. Although the involvement of various disciplines is beneficial for the user experience of the future application, the transition from a user needs analysis to a structured interaction analysis and UI design is not always straightforward. We propose storyboards, enriched by metadata, to specify functional and non-functional requirements. Accompanying tool support should facilitate the creation and use of storyboards. We used a meta-storyboard for the verification of storyboarding approaches.