1st International Workshop on User Interface and Experience for Software Engineering

User interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX) form the foundation of how people interact with modern software systems. With the proliferation of mobile, web, desktop, and multi-modal platforms, designing, implementing, testing, and evolving UIs has become central to modern software engineering. Beyond visual layout and interaction patterns, UI development today spans accessibility, personalization, automation, and seamless integration with backend logic and services. As AI technologies, such as large language models (LLMs), vision-language systems, and intelligent agents, increasingly support or automate UI interactions, a new wave of opportunities and challenges emerges at the intersection of UI/UX and software engineering.

This workshop aims to build a community around UI/UX engineering as a rigorous multidisciplinary research agenda within software engineering. It will highlight the unique challenges of engineering user interfaces, especially in the context of intelligent systems, cross-platform apps, accessibility compliance, and human-centric requirements. Through this forum, we hope to inspire new methodologies, tools, and benchmarks that reflect the evolving nature of UI and its growing impact on software quality, reliability, and user experience.

The primary objectives of this workshop are to:

• Share cutting-edge research and practices in user interface engineering, including designing, developing, testing, repair, evolution, accessibility, and AI-driven interaction.

• Facilitate discussions among researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, including software engineering, HCI, AI, and design communities, to address UI/UX challenges with both technical rigor and user-centered focus.

• Shape the research roadmap for UI/UX engineering by identifying foundational questions, bridging gaps in current techniques, and inspiring actionable future directions.

Accepted Papers

	Title
	Bias Beneath the Tone: Empirical Characterisation of Tone Bias in LLM-Driven UX Systems UISE Heet Bodara, Md Masum Mushfiq, Isma Farah Siddiqui Link to publication
	Co-design of an Accessible Avatar for Deaf Users: A Participatory Methodology in Practice UISE Carlos Eduardo Almeida Feitosa, Robson MORAES
	Designing an Accessible Blockly: An Extension-Based Accessibility Framework (EAF) for Structured Navigation and Editing UISE Rubel Hassan Mollik, Vamsi Krishna Kosuri, Hans Djalali, Stephanie Ludi, Aboubakar Mountapmbeme
	Engineering Adaptive Systems that Learn from Human Interaction UISE Silvia Abrahão
	Evolving Validation Sessions with Technology Probe Technique to Support the Engineering of Modern Software Systems UISE Larissa Galeno, Guilherme Horta Travassos
	Generative AI in GUI development: trends, tools, and prospects UISE Alison Alain de Oliveira, Vanessa Marques Alves da Silva Lima, Rhogger Freitas Silva, Anderson da Silva Soares, Renato de Freitas Bulcão-Neto
	Immersion Without Instability: A Digital Twin Approach to Solve Imbalance Issues in Virtual Reality UISE MD Irfan Pavel, M. Rasel Mahmud
	Metaverse and blockchain based 3D-2D interfaces for improving agile teams communication UISE Andrea Pinna, Maria Ilaria Lunesu, Xiaofeng Wang, Xiaozhou Li, Samuele Mannai, Gianni Fenu
	On Generative Requirements Engineering and UX Design UISE Walid Maalej
	PrivAuto: Practical Insights of On-Device Privacy-Preserving Agentic Systems for Mobile GUI Automation UISE Shen Hu, Evtim Kostadinov, Han Wang, Ludwig Felder
	Towards Human-in-the-loop User Interface Adaptation with Reinforcement Learning UISE Daniel Gaspar Figueiredo, Silvia Abrahão, Emilio Insfran
	UX Requirements Engineering for COSE Platforms: A Cultural Perspective UISE Grennda Guerra, Breno Miranda, Anton Fedosov
	Virtual Avatars for Accessible Consumer Services: A Rapid Review of Design Patterns and Challenges UISE Edson Moreira, Italo Uchoa, João Moraes, Ian Bruno Domingos Ferreira, Diogo Nascimento, Matheus Chagas, Ismayle Santos, Paulo Maia, Mariana Cavalcante

Call for Papers

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• AI-Enhanced UI/UX in Software Engineering

  • UI generation, repair, or transformation
  • Intelligent GUI testing
  • Agents for GUI automation
  • Usability evaluation
  • Personalization and accessibility
  • Human-in-the-loop UI adaptation and co-design with AI

• UI/UX-Centric Software Engineering

  • Methods for UI code analysis, maintenance, and evolution
  • Cross-platform UI consistency checking and testing
  • UI-driven software testing and test case generation
  • Engineering practices for accessibility (A11y)
  • UI/UX requirements engineering

• Benchmarks, Tooling, and Methodologies

  • UI/UX datasets for learning, testing, or empirical study
  • UI/UX metrics for evaluation
  • Cross-platform or cross-device frameworks
  • Benchmarks and evaluation for UI/UX engineering
  • Open-source tools supporting UI/UX in SE workflows

• Emerging Themes and Interdisciplinary Work

  • Multimodal or immersive UI systems (e.g., AR/VR, voice/UI hybrids, avionics, etc.)
  • Privacy, trust, and ethics in adaptive or personalized UIs
  • Integration of HCI and SE methods for UI/UX research

Submission Guidelines

We invite the following types of submissions:

• Full papers (research or experience): up to 8 pages including references, on novel approaches, tools, datasets, or studies

• Short papers (research or experience): up to 4 pages including references, on novel ideas and positions that have yet to be fully developed

• Extended abstracts: up to 5 pages including references, on position papers, early ideas, or reflections on practical challenges or lessons learned in UI/UX engineering

Note: As per the new ACM policies for open-access publishing, extended abstracts will be free of Article Processing Charges (APCs).

All submissions must be in English, in PDF format, and must not exceed the page limits listed above. The workshop follows a single-anonymous review process. Submissions should be made via HotCRP. Note that this year, the official “ACM Primary Article Template” should be used for submissions, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option and the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document: \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}.

Other detailed submission policies and formatting guidelines are aligned with the ICSE 2026 Research Track submission process (https://conf.researchr.org/track/icse-2026/icse-2026-research-track#submission-process).

Presentation Guidelines

Each accepted paper will have an approximately 12 minutes for the presentation and 3 minutes for Q&A.

Walid Maalej

Professor, Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany

Talk Title

On Generative Requirements Engineering and UX Design

Abstract

Software development projects often fail not due to technical issues, but rather because of misunderstood user needs and missing requirements. As the Turing Award Winner Fred Brooks famously said, „the hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.“ In this talk, I will reflect on how, in my research journey, I tried to tackle this hard challenge by leveraging data science and machine learning to make users, their experience, and their feedback a first-order concern in software engineering. I will also discuss how agentic and generative AI, which is currently reshaping software engineering, can be tightened to effectively address the requirements and design challenge, and conclude by highlighting pitfalls and new emerging issues.

Bio

Dr. Maalej is a full professor of informatics, a passionate mentor, and an award-winning researcher. His interests include Agentic Software Engineering, Modern Requirements Engineering and Design, Responsible AI Engineering, as well as Psychology and Communication. His work has received four Most Influential Paper awards and played a pivotal role in establishing the field of data-driven requirements engineering and in widening the scope of mining software repositories to users and social media data. Maalej’s work has inspired and been adopted by major software vendors such as SAP, Siemens, Google, and Microsoft. In addition to his research contributions, Maalej teaches software development to up to 700 students in a room using fun activities and pair-programming. He serves as a senior mentor in the tech-transfer and startup community and has led over 100 collaboration projects with industry.

Silvia Abrahão

Professor, Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain

Talk Title

Engineering Adaptive Systems that Learn from Human Interaction

Abstract

Understanding how software systems can continuously learn from human interaction has long been a central challenge in human-centered software engineering. In this talk, I reflect on my research journey investigating adaptive user interfaces capable of capturing contextual information, modeling user behavior, and improving interaction through machine learning techniques. I discuss how reinforcement learning approaches enable software systems to dynamically adapt user interfaces, supporting more effective and usable interaction experiences. I then consider how recent advances in artificial intelligence extend this vision by enabling new forms of human–AI collaboration in which software systems not only adapt to users but also actively support decision-making and creativity. I conclude by outlining open challenges for integrating user experience considerations into software engineering processes and for designing adaptive user interfaces that remain transparent, controllable, and aligned with human goals.

Bio

Silvia Abrahão is a Full Professor of Software Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain, where she also serves as Director of the Master’s Program in Software Systems Engineering. Her research focuses on human-centered software engineering, intelligent adaptation of user interfaces, model-driven engineering, and the empirical evaluation of software modeling approaches. She has led eighteen research projects and technology transfer contracts in collaboration with academic and industrial partners. She serves as Senior Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) and as Associate Editor and Department Editor for IEEE Software, where she is also Co-Editor of the Practitioner’s Digest department. In addition, she is a member of the Editorial and Advisory Boards of the Journal of Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) and the Journal of Software: Practice and Experience (SPE). She is currently Chair of the ACM Women in Computing Rising Star Award Committee.