Methods and Tools for Designing and Developing Usable Multi-Platform Interactive Applications

ABSTRACT The increasing availability of new types of interaction devices raises the need for new methods and tools to support the design and development of highly usable context-sensitive nomadic applications accessible through multiple platforms. This paper provides an overview and discusses a solution based on the use of multiple levels of abstractions, which has been studied within the framework of the European project CAMELEON. Moreover it addresses the problem of evaluating the usability of these tools by discussing the specific issues, the criteria and methodologies applied as well as some results obtained in an experimental activity on the subject. Keywords: nomadic, multi-platform, context-aware, model-based . Received 23 January 2004; received in revised form 1 April 2004; accepted 6 April 2004. 1. Introduction With the advent of the wireless Internet and the rapidly expanding market of smart devices, designing interactive applications supporting multiple platforms has become a difficult issue. In fact, on the one hand the decreasing cost at which the devices are now offered has enabled an increasing variety of people to become potential users of features and services of novel generations of communication technology as never before. On the other hand, rarely such a high number of flourishing range of opportunities offered have become effective, due to the low quality of the user interfaces provided to the users.