TERESA: an environment for the design and development of multi-platform user interfaces

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 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 preserving usability. The transformations are supported by an authoring tool, which provides designers and developers with various possibilities regarding how to apply them and to tailor them to their needs.