ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the unified user interface development paradigm as an effective software engineering recipe for user interfaces that can be automatically adapted to individual end users and contexts of use. It shows that runtime adaptation is essentially a cross-cutting system concern for interactive software applications that can be gradually accommodated a posteriori through a software refactoring process. The notion of automatic user interface adaptation reflects the capability of interactive software to adapt during runtime to the individual end user and to the particular context of use by delivering the most appropriate interactive experience. A unified user interface is the interaction-specific software of software applications or services, which is capable of self-adapting to the characteristics of the individual end user and context of use. The dialogue patterns component either embeds the software implementation of the various dialogue components or is aware of where those components physically reside by used dynamic query, retrieval, and activation methods.
