[Paper] User interaction with offline web applications: A case study about dissertation

[imnotteixeira]

Specifies some rules regarding the adaptation into offline tolerant web applications:

• Application domain level: The data model of the application is not modified so as to support as many applications as possible)
• Hypertext level: The navigation on the application could be slightly modified or adapted, regarding pages within the web application, depending on the connectivity status
• Presentation level: User interface should be adapted according to policies specific to each page element. the interaction with those elements would change depending on the connectivity status

It is, therefore, necessary to establish which components of the web application will be available in offline mode, and how.
To specify the navigation, they propose the notation presented by Albertos (TODO cite (2013). A Model-Based Approach for Supporting Offline Interaction with Web Sites Resilient to Interruptions.), representing the web pages as nodes, with edges meaning navigation withing the web application. Each node has attributes referring to policies about the behavior of the components in offline mode, as well as the mechanism to create the local copy. To specify the interface behavior in offline mode, the following policies are described:

• Hide: the element should be hidden, preventing user interaction
• Disable: The element should be shown, but interaction should not be possible
• Save: Save elements locally so that they can be accessed in offline mode (such as images, pdf docs, etc)
• Update: For elements that can be interacted with when in offline mode, they should by updated (synchronized) when connectivity is regained

When testing this mechanism in a real-world application, they obtained a user satisfaction score of 95.5, when compared to the usual (non-offline tolerant) version score of 66.5, which proves that having an offline mode improves substantially the User Experience in a Web Application.