UI Prototyping for Multiple Devices Through Specifying Interaction Design J¨ urgen Falb 1 , Roman Popp 1 ,ThomasR¨ock 2 , Helmut Jelinek 2 , Edin Arnautovic 1 , and Hermann Kaindl 1 1 Vienna University of Technology, ICT A-1040 Vienna, Austria {falb, popp, arnautovic, kaindl}@ict.tuwien.ac.at 2 Siemens Austria, PSE A-1210 Vienna, Austria {thomas.roeck, helmut.jelinek}@siemens.com Abstract. While user interface (UI) prototyping is generally considered useful, it may often be too expensive and time-consuming. This problem becomes even more severe through the ubiquitous use of a variety of devices such as PCs, mobile phones and PDAs, since each of these devices has its own specifics that require a special user interface. Instead of developing UI prototypes directly, we propose specifying one interaction design from which UIs can be automatically generated for multiple devices. Our implemented approach uses communicative acts, which derive from speech act theory and carry desired intentions in inter- actions. Models of communicative acts, UI domain objects and interac- tion sequences comprise interaction design specifications in our approach and are based on a metamodel that we have defined. We support the de- velopment of such models through an IDE, which is coupled with the UI generator. This allows a new form of UI prototyping, where the ef- fects of each model change can be seen immediately in the automatically generated UIs for every device at once. 1 Introduction User interface (UI) prototypes are generally considered useful, but the effort and time required for building one are often prohibitive. In order to address this issue, “low fidelity” prototyping offers a reasonable compromise. We propose a novel approach to UI prototyping with “perfect fidelity”, where the user interface is automatically generated. The result would be identical to the real UI due to this generation process, assuming that the same interaction design according to our approach is taken as input. In addition, our approach allows UI prototyping for multiple diverse devices at once (PCs, mobile phones and PDAs), from a single interaction design speci- fication. We are not aware of any previous approach like that. Of course, this approach to UI prototyping requires certain prerequisites. We build upon our previous work on automatic UI generation for multiple devices. C. Baranauskas et al. (Eds.): INTERACT 2007, LNCS 4662, Part I, pp. 136–149, 2007. c  IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007