A Computational Model for Adapting Presentation to Content in Web Interfaces

This paper proposes a novel computational model that allows the dynamic adaptation of the information to be presented to the user in the frame of a web application. In adaptive web-based hypermedia systems, content and presentation are usually dealt with independently and sequentially, generating content first and then adapting its presentation. By contrast, our approach is based on the idea that it is impossible to select the best content and the best presentation independently, but effective user-system interaction can only be achieved through a joint assessment of content characteristics and presentation alternatives. Consequently, the goal of the approach is to determine the best match between a set of contents eligible to be presented to the user and a collection of possible presentations. To this end, the quality of a match is assessed on the basis of a set of user interface design principles focused on the relations existing between content and presentation. These principles express different and often contrasting exigencies and are generally articulated in vague and merely qualitative terms. In our approach they are formalized as soft constraints to be satisfied to the highest possible degree. A fuzzy approach is adopted to compute the degree to which a match satisfies each principle and to aggregate the results of the application of a set of interface design principles to a match. The proposed approach is substantiated through a running example in the area of e-commerce.