Computer Science and Engineering

In this paper, we argue that current user interface modeling tools are developed using a formalism-centric approach that does not support the needs of modern software development. In order to solve this problem we need both usable and expressive notations and tools that enable the creation of user-interface specifications that leverage the design and thought process. In this paper we present the CanonSketch tool. CanonSketch supports a new UI specification language – Canonical Abstract Prototypes (CAP) – that bridges the gap between envisioned user behavior and the concrete user interface. The tool also supports two additional and synchronized views of the UI: the Wisdom UML presentation extension and concrete HTML user interfaces. In this way the tool seamlessly supports designers while switching from high level abstract views of the UI and low-level concrete realizations.

Existing software modeling tools are widely recognized to be hard to use and, hence, to adopt. We believe those usability problems are related to a legacy of formalism-centric tools that don’t promote the new challenges of modern software development. In this short paper, we briefly describe a new tool, under development, that tries to promote usability in modeling tools to support collaborative development of interactive software. It focuses on usable, real-world languages and a developer-centered design.

The commercial use of the Internet for service provision has deeply changed the environment where human-computer interaction takes place. Web interfaces are now integrated in overall service provision, and are designed for a huge and diversified set of potential users, in an uncontrolled context. With the aim of understanding customer interaction needs and improving the methods of requirements elicitation in the web context, a qualitative study of a multi-channel Portuguese bank was made. The results obtained so far indicate that Interaction Design and Services Marketing have strong complementarities. The Marketing perspective is especially useful with regard to the study of customer experience requirements, which are increasingly influential in customer decisions to adopt Internet services. Essential use cases are also very useful in the multiple platform service context, as they allow the elicitation of experience requirements in a technology-independent way, and therefore allow an integrated management of the different interaction channels.

This paper describes a new unifying workstyle model for the user-centered design process, comprised of eight dimensions that we claim as fundamental to supporting the UCD process. Our proposal is new because it is the first workstyle model tailored to UCD. We also show the usefulness of workstyle modeling when evaluating the stage/effort of a project at a given time. Our workstyle model was based on the identification of the main obstacles to UCD and SE integration, current research results and extensive observation of HCI students involved in UCD projects. Though simple, it models the designer’s behavior and can be effectively and easily used to (a) choose adequate tool support for a given phase of a project and (b) drive the development of new UCD tools.

The UML is recognized to be the dominant diagrammatic modeling language in the software industry. However, it’s support for building interactive systems is still acknowledged to be insufficient. There is a common misconception that the same models developed to support the design of the application internals are also adequate to support interaction design, leveraging the usability aspects of the applications. In this paper we identify and discuss the major problems using the UML to document, specify and design interactive systems. Here we propose a UML profile for interactive systems development that leverages on human-computer interaction domain knowledge under the common notation and semantics of the UML. Our proposal integrates with existing object-oriented software engineering best practice, fostering co- evolutionary development of interactive systems and enabling artifact change between software engineering and human-computer interaction.

In our research, we have been combining Work Style modeling with the well-established principles of Usage-Centered Design having the objective of designing and evaluating better design tools. Our approach distinguishes itself from the fact that it combines work style quantitative data (easily obtained through logging tools) with qualitative data that predicts a given tool’s level of acceptance. We describe a set of principles that were proven successful during this design process, illustrate sketches of the tools, and highlight the relevant design aspects that worked and those that didn’t work.

Software patterns played a major role in object-oriented development, enabling and promoting reuse at higher levels of abstraction. Patterns provided an excellent way to increase the productivity and control in object-oriented information systems’ development. The user-interface is well known to be responsible for a considerable part of the development effort in interactive systems. Yet, we still lack a standard, or at least commonly accepted, notation to express technical representations of UI patterns that convey the solution in an abstract way that can be applied in many different design situations. In this paper we argue that one of the problems preventing the identification and dissemination of UI patterns is the lack of such a modeling notation. We discuss this problem and present an approach based on set of UML extensions specifically adapted for UI design.

UML has become the standard language for modelling in different areas and domains, but it is widely recognized that it lacks support for User Interface Design (UID). On the other hand, ConcurTaskTree (CTT) is one of the most widely used notations for task and dialogue modelling. An important achievement is the proposed notation and semantics for CTT by extending the UML metamodel, proving that task modelling in user interface design can be accomplished by a UML compliant notation. For the interface structure design was proposed that UML’s CTT could be complemented with Canonical Abstract Prototypes (CAP) leading to a model-based user interface design method co-specified by the presentation (CAP) and behaviour (UML’s CTT) perspectives. In this paper we propose another step in this UID method by defining a specific model compliant with the OMG recommended Model Driven Architecture (MDA), which will be the intermediary between the design model and an implementation of the user interface. This proposal will align the UID method with the MDA recommendation making it possible to automatically generate interface prototypes from conceptual models.

The UML is recognized to be the dominant diagrammatic modeling language in the software industry. However, it’s support for building interactive systems is still acknowledged to be insufficient. In this paper we discuss and identify the major problems using the UML framework for interactive system development, specifically, in what concerns the architectural issues. Here we present a conceptual architectural model that expands the analysis framework of the Unified Process and the UML profile for software development processes. Our proposal leverages on user-interface domain knowledge, fostering coevolutionary development of interactive systems and enabling artifact change between software engineering and human-computer interaction, under the common notation and semantics of the UML.

This paper aims to use the previous work related to the DELPHI method, and, in particular, the Q-Sort method for information retrieval of a panel of experts, to provide a new and simple algorithm to generate Q-Sort matrices that adjust to the size of a given survey to have more questions whose weight is null for the outcome of the round, giving experts the need to prioritise some questions above others in order to reach a consensus in a more direct way.