Design Options for Multimodal Web Applications

The capabilities of multimodal applications running on the web are well delineated since they are mainly constrained by what their underlying standard mark up language offers, as opposed to hand-made multimodal applications. As the experience in developing such multimodal web applications is growing, the need arises to identify and define major design options of such application to pave the way to a structured development life cycle. This paper provides a design space of independent design options for multimodal web applications based on three types of modalities: graphical, vocal, tactile, and combined. On the one hand, these design options may provide designers with some explicit guidance on what to decide or not for their future user interface, while exploring various design alternatives. On the other hand, these design options have been implemented as graph transformations per-formed on a user interface
model represented as a graph. Thanks to a transformation engine, it allows designers
to play with the different values of each design option, to preview the results of the transformation, and to obtain the corresponding code on-demand.