David Navarre
Philippe Palanque
Jean-Francois Ladry
Eric Barboni
Abstract
The design of real-life complex systems calls for advanced software engineering models, methods, and tools in order to meet critical requirements such as reliability, dependability, safety, or resilience that will avoid putting the company, the mission, or even human life at stake. When such systems encompass a substantial interactive component, the same level of confidence is required towards the human-computer interface. Conventional empirical or semiformal techniques, although very fruitful, do not provide sufficient insight on the reliability of the human-system cooperation, and offer no easy way to, for example, quantitatively and qualitatively compare two design options with respect to that reliability. The aim of this article is to present a user interface description language (called ICOs) for the engineering and development of usable and reliable user interfaces. The CASE tool supporting the ICOs notation (called Petshop) is a Petri nets-based-tool for the design, specification, prototyping, and validation of interactive software. In that environment models (built with the formal description technique ICOs) of the interactive application can be interactively modified and executed. This is used to support prototyping phases (when the models and the interactive application evolve significantly to meet late user requirements, for instance) as well as the operation phase (after the system is deployed). The use of ICOs and PetShop is presented on several large-scale systems such as a multimodal ground segment application for satellite control, an air traffic control interactive application, and an application for new generation of interactive cockpits in large civil aircraft such as Airbus A380 or Boeing 787. The article emphasizes the demonstration of the expressive power of the notation and how it can support the description of various aspects of user interfaces, namely interaction techniques (both WIMP and post-WIMP), interactive components (such as widgets), and the behavioral part of interactive applications such as the dialog and the functional core. It also demonstrates that PetShop provides dedicated support for prototyping activities of behavioral aspects at the various levels of the architecture of interactive systems. While the focus is on past work done on various large-scale applications, the article also highlights why and how ICOs and Petshop are able to address challenges raised by next-generation user interfaces.
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Index Terms
- ICOs: A model-based user interface description technique dedicated to interactive systems addressing usability, reliability and scalability
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Reviews
Vladan Jovanovic
The paper presents a novel user interface formal description technique, its language (ICOs), and Petshop, "the CASE tool supporting ICOs notation." ICOs and Petshop were field-tested on large-scale systems within the demanding domain of interactive safety-critical systems, including "a multimodal ground segment application for satellite control, an air traffic control interactive application, and an application for ... interactive cockpits in large civil aircraft." The language and the tool developed to support this model-based technique can be used for a broader set of situations, to specify and prototype user interfaces. In terms of its capabilities, it compares favorably to alternative user interface description/prototyping approaches. The authors include a comprehensive comparison with related works (with major references) that use appropriate classifications of user interface description languages (UIDLs), scalability, tool support, and, most importantly, expressiveness. In terms of expected advantages, ICOs focuses on usability, reliability, and scalability. The central part of this long paper comprises ICOs concepts, a brief illustration of Petshop's capabilities, and four case studies. In addition, the summary section outlines benefits of the approach, and invites readers who are interested in designing and validating the next generation of user interfaces to try ICOs. I highly recommend the paper to serious human-computer interaction (HCI) students and professionals charged with specifying/prototyping complex interactive systems with rich interfaces. Online Computing Reviews Service
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