Generating Consistent Interfaces for Appliances

We are building a system called the personal universal controller (PUC) that automatically generates interfaces for handheld devices that allow users to remotely control all of the appliances in their surrounding environment. One of the goals of this system is to create interfaces that are consistent for the user. We are interested in two forms of consistency: with other interfaces on the same handheld device and with previously generated interfaces for similar appliances. While these problems differ slightly from the problem of ensuring an application has a consistent inter- face across multiple devices, we believe a solution to any of these problems will prove useful for solving the others. This paper discusses the challenges that we see for automatically generating consistent interfaces and ideas that we are pursuing to address the consistency problem.