Inspector

Duration

2006 - 2008

Members

Thomas Memmel, Florian Geyer, Johannes Rinn, Daniel Koenig, Harald Reiterer

Description

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 de-scriptions 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 UI specification method that interactively integrates interdisciplinary and informal modelling languages with different fidelities of UI prototyping. With an innovative experimental tool, we finally assemble models and design to an interactive UI specification.

Since March 2008, Inspector is part of the usiXML supply chain.

The paper entitled Tool-Support for Interdisciplinary and Collaborative User Interface Specification won the best paper award at the IADIS IHCI conference in Amsterdam, 2008.