A Design Space for Context-Sensitive User Interfaces

Context-sensitive user interfaces become a very impor-tant class of interfaces as they reconfigure their presenta-tion and dialog according to various events generated in a dynamic context of use. Traditional procedural ap-proaches for developing such use interfaces are very ex-pressive, yet expensive to develop, difficult to use and verbose to write. Declarative model-based approaches have recently been considered as they allow user inter-face code generation from models, they are quick to ma-nipulate, yet they lack expressiveness. It is argued that a mixed model-based approach obtained by mixing and in-tegrating declarative and procedural elements combine advantages of both approaches without suffering of their shortcomings. An example shows how this new approach can effectively and efficiently produce context-sensitive user interfaces.