Selexels: Adapting User Interfaces to Mobile Input Devices

Revision with unchanged content. Selexels is a conceptual framework that guides a user interface (UI) designer to adapt a UI to input devices with low expressiveness: devices that have limited ability to convey intended meaning. By adjusting the interface, the user can enjoy a fluid and smooth interaction, without suffering from the technical weaknesses of the input device, such as low sampling rate or low resolution. We have evaluated this framework through some user studies using Fitts Law. As a proof of concept, we have implemented Selexel Toolkit. Selexel Toolkit can help UI programmers in two ways. The first way is when a programmer has already created a UI, working properly with the mouse and keyboard, but he wants to change the UI code, so that the same UI can be used with an input device, having low expressiveness, such as a mobile phone. In such a case, the Selexel Toolkit adapts the original UI to match the expressiveness of the input device. The second way is to give programmers a new Layout Manager, in addition to java standard Layout Managers, i.e., a new tool for laying out their UI in a different way with getting advantage of layout constraints that can also be useful in other application areas.

M.Sc. Media Informatics from RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Research Assistant at Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany.