Designers still often create a specific user interface for every target platform they wish to support, which is time-consuming and error-prone. The need for a multi-platform user interface design approach that designers feel comfortable with increases as people expect their applications and data to go where they go. We present Gummy, a multi-platform graphical user interface builder that can generate an initial design for a new platform by adapting and combining features of existing user interfaces created for the same application. Our approach makes it easy to target new plat- forms and keep all user interfaces consistent without requiring designers to considerably change their work practice.

Semantic service descriptions have paved the way for flexible interaction with services in a mobile computing environment. Services can be automatically discovered, invoked and even composed. On the contrary, the user interfaces for interacting with these services are often still designed by hand. This approach poses a serious threat to the overall flexibility of the system. To make the user interface design process scale, it should be automated as much as possible. We propose to augment service descriptions with high-level user interface models to support automatic user interface adaptation. Our method builds upon OWL-S, an ontology for Semantic Web Services, by connecting a collection of OWL-S services to a hierarchical task structure and selected presentation information. This allows end-users to interact with services on a variety of platforms.

Methods to support the creation of multi-device user interfaces typically use some type of abstraction of the user interface design. To retrieve the final user interface from the abstraction a transformation will be applied that specializes the abstraction for a particular target platform. The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) offers a way to create multi-device user interface descriptions while maintaining the consistency of certain aspects of a user interface across platforms. We extended the UIML language with support for layout constraints. Designers can create layout templates based on constraints that limit the ways a user interface can rearrange across platforms. This results in a higher degree of consistency and reusability of interface designs.