HyMobWeb: uma abordagem para a adaptação híbrida de interfaces Web móveis sensíveis ao contexto e com suporte à multimodalidade

Abstract

The use of mobile devices to browse the Web has become increasingly popular as a consequence of easy access to the Internet. However, moving from the desktop development to the mobile platform features, requests from developers an important focus on interaction elements which fit into the interaction demands. There by, several approaches have emerged for adaptation of Web applications. One of the most adopted solution by Web developers are front-end frameworks . Nevertheless, this technique has shortcomings that directly impact in the interaction elements and user satisfaction. In this scenario, the objective of this work is to propose a hybrid adaptation approach of context-sensitive Web interfaces with multimodality support, called HyMobWeb, which aims to help developers to create solutions closer to the device’s characteristics, to the contexts of use and the needs of end-users. The approach is composed of stages of static and dynamic adaptation. Static adaptation subsidizes developers in marking elements to be adapted through a grammar that can reduce the coding effort of solutions that address aspects related to multimodality and context sensitivity. Dynamic adaptation is responsible for analyzing changes in the context of the user and performing the marked adaptations in static adaptation. The approach was outlined from a review of the literature on mobile Web interface adaptation and three exploratory studies. The first and second study dealt with end users’ difficulties regarding the use of non-mobile Web applications. The third is about gaps in traditional adaptations - made through frameworks front-end - in relation to the users needs. Aiming to evaluate the approach, two evaluations were carried out, one from the perspective of the developer and another from the end user. The first one focused on verifying the acceptance of the proposal by software developers in the use of the grammar and resources proposed from it. The second sought to identify if the adaptation, previously implemented by the developers, brought satisfaction to the end-users during its use. The findings suggested that HyMobWeb brought significant contributions to the work of the developers and that the resources explored by the approach provided positive reactions to the satisfaction of end-users.