• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.37 no.1
• /
• pp.19-28
• /
• 2010

Recently, various home appliances are inter connected in wired/wireless network to provide a single service, but their interfaces are not uniformly integrated. In order to get a service in such an environment, users have to figure out how to control each appliance and the way of combining its functions with others. Even worse to the users, many buttons are barely used to control the complicated functions of the appliances on the remote controllers, and controllers have very similar shapes in each other. In this paper, based on the definitions of a task as a unit of services provided in the environment of multi-connected appliances, we propose a markup language for home appliances, called HAML (Home Appliance Markup Language), for generating task-based user interfaces to help controlling multi-connected appliances as one pleases. The proposed method generates interfaces by gathering the buttons frequently used and necessary for tasks, and provides automatic settings of multi-connected appliances. The proposed method is verified with an analysis of scenarios and usability tests.