Abstract. 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. 1.

The construction of software systems is becoming increasingly complex because of the changing environments the software is supposed to function in. Taking into account the context of use, how the system reacts and anticipates changes in its working environment, is important for a wide range of applications, such as mobile services for example. Model-driven design is already widely accepted as a software engineering methodology to cope with these new type of requirements. This approach is known both in software engineering (e.g. model-driven architecture) as in the design of user interfaces (model-based user interface development), but although they target the same deficiencies from traditional approaches, there is still a gap between both. New modeling elements are necessary that allow the designer to make both context of use and user interactions explicit in the design phase and to create context-sensitive software that will be more robust and usable. We extend the UML 2.0 notation to address the aforementioned issues and present extensions to support the modeling of context-sensitive interactive applications. These extensions are defined in a new UML profile that can easily be used in existing modeling environments.

Abstract. This paper describes a new unifying workstyle model for the usercentered 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. 1

In this paper, we argue that the combination of task modeling with abstract prototyping improves the effectiveness of the user interface design at an early stage of the development process. Currently there is no effective way to connect popular task and presentation based formalisms (e.g. ConcurTaskTrees- CTTs and Canonical Abstract Prototypes- CAPs) in interactive system development. Here we present and illustrate an approach that relates CTTs with CAPs under the common semantics of the UML 2.0. We find that an abstract prototype is more suitable as a starting point to represent and infer the task structure that supports the user interaction. Our approach is supported by the DialogSketch tool, which enables the creation, design and editing of a UML version of CAPs and CTTs that can be co-edited and simulated in an innovative way that leverages effective and usable simulation of abstract user-interfaces. Categories and Subject Descriptors H5.2 Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,HCI): User

Model-based design of user interfaces can be a viable alternative for other user interface specifications especially in the case of multi-platform and even more so in the case of context-sensitive interactive applications. In this paper we look at several notations used in model-based design methodologies and analyze them according to requirements we determined for the notations. In order to get an overview of how well different approaches are able to support the design context-sensitive interactive applications, we determine a set of models that are relevant for this type of applications and organize them visually in such a way that the level of support for different models and the relations between them could be shown adequately. Several notations used for model-based design of user interface or interactive systems were evaluated using these criteria. The resulting information was used to determine areas where work is needed to design better notations for the involved. Author Keywords Model-based user interface design, context-sensitive

This research aims at designing and evaluating a new generation of usable and multimodal Requirements and Analysis Tools, capable of promoting artifact co-evolution in a useful manner, enabling cooperation and communication of multiple stakeholders over a common semantic model. The main goal is to leverage the elicitation of functional and nonfunctional requirements by using multimodal interaction techniques, and driving software development using a conceptual architecture easily extracted from user task flows. 1. Problem Statement Requirements management and elicitation is widely recognized to be one of the major problems in modern software development. This stage of development involves multiple stakeholders, usually with different backgrounds, and is currently faced with the advent of multi-platform development [10]. In this context, new tools are required to enable cooperation and communication of multiple stakeholders over a common semantic model that is capable of driving modern software development. Lack of user involvement has traditionally been “the number one reason for project failure” and requirements engineering tools seem to have “the most significant impact on a project’s success ” [13]. The available Requirements Engineering (RE) tools are currently limited to modeling and management tools [14] that are hard to use and only of interest to disciplined engineers, leaving all other stakeholders (executives, marketers, clients and end-users) aside. The lack of adequate and usable tools has also been blocking technology transfer from academia to industry

When the user interface (UI) has to be specified, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the worst thing one can do is attempt to write a natural language specification for it. Nevertheless, this practice is still common, and it is therefore a difficult task to move from text-based requirements and problem-space concepts to a final UI design, and then back again. Especially for the specification of interactive UIs, however, actors must frequently switch between high-level descriptions and detailed screens. In our research we found that advanced UI specifications therefore have to be made up of interconnected artefacts that have distinct levels of abstraction. With regards to the transparency and traceability of the rationale of the UI specification, transitions and dependencies must be visual and traversable. We introduce a modelbased UI specification method that interactively integrates interdisciplinary and informal modelling languages with different fidelities of UI prototyping to an interactive design rationale. With an innovative experimental tool we assemble models and design to an interactive UI specification. With a zoomable user interface (ZUI) approach, we can visualize the modelled artefacts and the overall UI specification space on desktop computers as well as on megapixel displays.

Abstract When the user interface should be specified, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the worst thing to do is write a natural language specification for it. Although this practice is still common, it is a challenging task to move from text-based requirements and problem-space concepts to a final UI design, and then back. Especially for user interface specification, actors must frequently switch between high-level descriptions and low-level detailed screens. In our research we found out that advanced specifications should to be made up of interconnected artefacts that have distinct levels of abstraction. With regards to the transparency and traceability of the rationale of the specification process, transitions and dependencies must be visual and traversable. For this purpose, a user interface specification method is introduced that interactively integrates interdisciplinary and informal modelling languages with different levels of fidelity of user interface prototyping. With an innovative experimental tool, we finally assemble models and design to an interactive user interface specifications. 1.

Abstract: When the user interface is specified, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the worst thing one can do is write a natural-language specification for it. Because this practice is still common, it is a challenging task to move from text-based requirements and problem-space concepts to a final UI design, and then back again. However, this activity is required frequently and is necessary to drive creative ideas. In our research we found that advanced UI specifications should therefore be made up of interconnected artefacts that have distinct levels of abstraction. With regards to the transparency and traceability of the rationale of the specification process, transitions and dependencies must be visual and traversable. For this purpose, we introduce a model-based user interface specification method and a corresponding experimental tool that interactively integrates interdisciplinary and informal models with different levels of fidelity of user-interface prototyping. With innovative styles of interaction and user input, our proposed tool supports the collaboration required in a multidisciplinary context.

Abstract. 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.