Consistent runtime adaptation of user interfaces

Modern User Interfaces (UIs) are increasingly expected to be plastic, in the sense that they retain a constant level of usability, even when subjected to context (platform, user, and environment) changes at runtime. Plasticity is often achieved by specifying suitable runtime adaptations of the UI as a response to changing contexts. While there exist numerous approaches to enabling dynamic UI adaptation at runtime, we argue that a series of consistency-related challenges arise during the adaptation process, which have not yet been adequately addressed. In this paper, therefore, we suggest a useful definition of consistency in this context, identify some important and open consistency-related challenges, and highlight solution strategies inspired by results and insights from research on bidirectional transformations.