Design and development of multi-device user interfaces through multiple logical descriptions

The increasing availability of new types of interaction platforms raises a number of issues for designers and developers. There is a need for new methods and tools to support development of nomadic applications, which can be accessed through a variety of devices. This paper presents a solution, based on the use of three levels of abstractions, that allows designers to focus on the relevant logical aspects and avoid dealing with a plethora of low-level details. We have defined a number of transformations able to obtain user interfaces from such abstractions, taking into account the available platforms and their interaction modalities while preserving usability. The transformations are supported by an authoring tool, TERESA, which provides designers and developers with various levels of automatic support and several possibilities for tailoring such transformations to their needs.