The Cameleon Reference Framework: A Systematic Mapping Study

Details

Supervisors

Vanderdonckt, Jean

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

The Cameleon Reference Framework (CRF) is a reference framework for characterizing multi-target user interfaces, i.e. user interfaces to the same interactive application, but that targets multiple contexts of use. A context of use involves a user and her interactive tasks working with a device, a computing platform in a certain environment. Any variation of these three dimensions, user, platform, or environment, induces another context of use, which leads to a potentially different user interface. The CRF has been widely used in the literature to decompose the development process into four levels: tasks and concepts, abstract user interface, concrete user interface, and final user interface. This thesis performs a systematic mapping study of a corpus of N =232 scientific references which quoted the seminal CRF paper to investigate the impact of the framework on these studies. For this purpose, a forward snowballing approach reduced the initial set of Ni=1272 references to a final corpus of Nf =232 references that were systematically parsed, analyzed, and classified according to some criteria including CRF levels of abstraction, and CRF concepts. The thesis discusses the results of this mapping study and draws some conclusions highlighting how the CRF has been used over the last two decades and how its structure has impacted the development life cycle of multitarget user interfaces.