Advanced User Interface Specification by Thomas Memmel is a blog that covers topics related to user interface requirements engineering and specification practice. The blog shall provide a basis for ongoing discussion and exchange of results in HCI resaerch.
UI Specification: travelling from strategy to surface
9/9/2008 | posted by
memmel
In the last postings of my Catalyze blog, I described the idea of interactive UI specifications. Such a specification incorporates not just UI design prototypes, but the set of all models and artefacts that make up the design process and the design rationale. This includes text-based descriptions as well as diagrammatic notations.
Interactive specifications provide a more tangible and living way to define the look and feel of a UI. When the UI is discussed at the design layer, stakeholders and ...
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I was recommended to read through a book of M. Schrage titled “Serious Play”. In the very beginning of the book I found the term “prototyping-driven specification”. This means that the specification is very much defined by intense prototyping efforts. Conversely, “specification-driven prototyping” is primarily propelled by formal (modelling) processes that ultimately end up in a detailed paper-based specification document. With regards the IT organizations I ...
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Bridging the gaps between the disciplines has become a established field of research related to the design and specification of user interfaces. The topic is on the list of IFIP’s workgroup 2.7/13.4 on user interface engineering and being discussed during conferences such as the HCSE.
Both the name of the workgroup and the conference point out to the fact that the related research is mostly focused on a common denominator for software and usability engineering processes.
The issue is com ...
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When the user interface (UI) has to be specified, a picture is worth a thousand words and the worst thing a human-computer interaction (HCI) expert 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, HCI experts must frequently switch ...
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Collaboration and communication is essential to promote UI design decision. But the difference between these groups of actors and their favorite tools tends to result in a mixture of formats. This makes it difficult to collaboratively promote concepts and creative thinking without media disruptions and loss of precision (Memmel et al. 2007). The following negative factors therefore contribute to UI specification and development failure:
The lack of a common course of action and the use o ...
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I read through the postings of Tom concerning requirements traceability at this link.
In my experience, good requirements traceability is among the most important success criteria during the specification of interactive user interfaces. A usability expert needs support for requirements traceability at different stages of a user interface design project:
1) During requirements analysis: the usability expert must elicit, manage and relate different requirements to each other. Models that d ...
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Because of the immaturity of their UI development processes, industrial clients determined on a shift of responsibility. In my research I found the following sticking points that tend to change current UI specification practice:
Due to the strategic impact of many software products, clients want to increase their UI-related competency in order to reflect corporate values by high UI quality
Whereas conceptual modelling, prototyping or evaluation have always been undertaken by supplier ...
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A style guide is a reference that establishes the look-and-feel of a user interface by clearly defining the standards and conventions of that user interface. The purpose of creating a style guide is to bring together in a single document all previous requirements and UI design work products.
There are clearly some advantages of writing classical style guides, although this activity requires often a very huge effort and the resulting documents can easily reach the extent of several hundreds of p ...
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In our research we defined the term "visual user interface specification" in order to describe a different approach in specifying interactive systems.
Visual: The specification should neither be delivered as text-based specification, nor solely consist of abstract models (e.g. use case diagrams, interaction diagrams). The specification needs to be an interactive simulation
User Interface: We focus on the specification of the UI with affects both look and feel of the UI. ...
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