Responsive Web Interaction
27/11/2017
Félix Albertos Marco defended his doctoral dissertation “Responsive Web Interaction: Dynamic Management of the Interaction in Web Applications” [1] in Novembre 2017.
On his thesis, he showed how Internet has made interaction with Web applications possible from almost anywhere and using any device. As a result, we can use the Web platform to perform tasks using multiple devices in a coordinated manner, utilizing the interactive resources distributed among them and, moreover, in situations where there are connectivity issues.
In recent years, many theoretical and practical proposals have focused on managing these complex interactive scenarios. However, issues in this regard remain unsolved. Consequently, it seems necessary to analyse and develop new proposals that further study how to dynamically manage interaction on Web applications using the basic elements of which they are comprised.
An analysis of previous proposals, both theoretical and technological, has been conducted to support the main ideas that drive our research. These are related to the management of connectivity issues and multi-device environments, particularly in Web applications. Most of the proposals to enable interaction among many devices focus on splitting the user interface in several parts that are copied and/or moved and on preserving a coherent state of the system to complete users’ tasks in multi-device environments. Very few of the proposals address defining and enabling the management of interactive events, considering connectivity to the system and multi-device configuration.
Before developing the core part of our work, we have made some theoretical and practical proposals to obtain preliminary results that allow us to continue with our research. These works constitute the basis of our proposal for the dynamic management of interaction. From these works, we conclude that the basic elements of the Web, those that allow user interaction, do not take into account the peculiarities of multi-device environments and offline scenarios.
Responsive Web Interaction is proposed to perform the dynamic management of interaction in Web applications. It focuses on presentation and navigation levels for the description of the interaction in current scenarios. This proposal is formalised through a model that permits the description of the interaction in Web applications at navigation and presentation levels.
The next step is to use our model, and thus test it, in several Web scenarios. To this end, the execution of the model in real Web applications is desirable. Therefore, two tools have been developed. Each one focuses on one of the modelling levels of Web applications: Proxy Offline for the navigational level and Responsive Web Interaction Tool for the presentation level.
Finally, to validate our proposal, several prototypes have been developed and evaluated in selected scenarios. Many case studies have been selected with the aim of executing our proposal in as many representative scenarios as possible. All these scenarios take into account the dynamic management of the interaction in current Web applications.