A Survey on Guiding Logic for Automatic User Interface Generation

Mobile devices and other computationally-capable artifacts are presenting new ways in which to interact with our applications and data. However, to do so effectively requires user interfaces that are optimized for the target platform. Designing such user interfaces manually for every platform and application would be an impractical way to approach this problem; this is one area where automatic user interface generation could prove useful. This process, however, requires guiding logic, formalized from usability knowledge and represented in a form that an automatic UI generation system can use. This paper discusses some of the issues related to this task, presenting examples from the relevant literature. The paper then introduces the concept of genericity, which could help manage the problem space encompassed by automatic UI generation.