Task Models and Diagrams for User Interface Design

When organizations change Business Processes (BP) aiming for improvements, such changes normally impact on systems’ User Interfaces (UI), which represent a tangible resource for communication with customers, suppliers, partners, or investors; thus a source of competitive advantage and differentiation. To manage the link between UIs and BPs, we propose a framework that classifies the core elements and the operations performed on them, represented through rules that are used to support impact analysis. This solution has been analyzed in a large bank-insurance organization, which has enabled the proposal of an innovative strategy that integrates researches on interaction design and business process management with implications on practical scenarios of result-driven organizations.

As organizations need to adapt constantly, it becomes increasingly important for stakeholders to start talking a ‘business-process language’ - they need to develop an understanding of processes in terms of intertwining work structure and behavior information. The closer business-process modeling techniques are to mental representations of their users, i.e. the more intuitively models can be created and communicated, the more effectively models can be utilized in the course of change processes. In our empirical study we were interested in adequately supporting participatory management of change based on business process models. The stakeholders’ individual cognitive work load should be minimal when explicating and sharing process knowledge. In the study individuals not familiar with modeling were introduced to the idea of business-process modeling, and asked to model a given scenario. We also asked them to use a notation with open semantics to enable authentic representations. The results show in the majority of cases flow-oriented understanding of business - process modeling, and in some cases natural language orientation. The data suggest providing respective modeling techniques and tools for organizational development.

Diagrams and tools help to support task modelling in engineering and process management. Unfortunately they are unfit to help in a business context at a strategic level, because of the flexibility needed for creative thinking and user friendly interactions. We propose a tool which bridges the gap between freedom of actions, encouraging creativity, and constraints, allowing validation and advanced features.

The introduction of new technologies leads to a more and more complex interactive systems design. In order to describe the future interactive system, the human computer interaction domain uses specific models, design processes and tools in order to represent, create, store and manipulate models. The aim of our work is to facilitate the work of model designers and project managers by helping them in choosing processes, modeling environments adapted to their specific needs. This paper details the use of a service-oriented approach for model management. Our propositions are related to three different abstract levels: the operational level to choose the appropriate tool, the organisational level to select a process and the intentional level to define modelling goals.

Designers and developers of virtual environments have to consider that providing adaptation in virtual environments is important to comply with users’ different characteristics. Due to the many possibilities of adaptation that a designer can think of, it is necessary to support the integration of adaptation in the application in a rapid and practical way. We propose to achieve this by adopting the VR-DeMo model-based user interface design (MBUID) process which supports context. In this paper, we strive to integrate adaptation in virtual environments using a context-aware design process and present a validation of this approach with two case studies, namely supporting the adaptation of switching between interaction techniques and adapting the interaction technique itself. These case studies learned us that adaptation can be easily realized using our context-aware model-based design process.

Many industrial applications have large and complex interfaces that grow incrementally over time. Typically, these interfaces will be used by people with different user profiles. The combination of these facts demands a software methodology and tool support that ideally allow consistency checks and configuration in order to avoid a system to become unusable. In this paper, we present an approach in which task models are used throughout the design and development cycle up to the final application. The task model is not only used at design time, but is also used to check for potential problems with e.g. consistency during configuration of the final application.

Process- and task-driven workflow support has become vital for enterprises as they operate in an increasingly networked business environment. Thereby business process specifications represent boundary objects not only between different organizational units, but also between technology and business operations. Process specifications need to be integrated and implemented in a flexible way for actual work-task support. Although several business process techniques and technologies are in place there are still several transformational steps to be performed when implementing business operations based on detailed work descriptions. One effective way to prevent incoherencies is role-specific and task-driven modeling, representation, and processing of business operations. The introduced approach is termed subject-oriented business process management, as it ensures coherence between modeling and execution through focusing on the communication flow among process participants (subjects) in the course of work- task accomplishment.

Zoomable user interfaces are more attractive because they offer the possibility to present information and to support actions according to a "focus+context" method: while a context of use is preserved or presented in a more compact way, the focus can be achieved on some part of the information and actions, enabling the end user to focus on one part at a time. While this interaction technique can be straightforwardly applied for manipulating objects of the same type (e.g., cells in a spreadsheet or appointments in a calendar), it is less obvious how to present interactive tasks of an information system where tasks may involve very different amount and types of information and actions. For this purpose, this paper introduces a metric based on a task model in order to decide what portion of a task model should lead to a particular user interface container, group, or fragment, while preserving the task structure. Each branch of the task model is assigned to a weight that will lead to such a container, group, or fragment depending on parameters computed on variables belonging to the context of use. In this way, not only the task structure is preserved, but also the decomposition of the user interface into elements depends on the context of use, particularly the constraints imposed by the computing platform.

The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate the effectiveness of using Situation Calculus in Task Modelling. The motivation for this approach is to enable a runtime adaptable task model to be used in the provision of the most appropriate user interfaces, according to circumstance. The task model and meta-reasoning model may both be specfied in the Situation Calculus, which permits reasoning to occur over couterfactual situations and without exhaustive state enumeration. A task flow editor with input from the formal model is demonstrated and the approach is described using a medical process case study.

While past research presents objects as essential entities in task modeling, they are in fact rarely used. In the first tool that truly considered objects, K-MADe, two main reasons may explain this limited use: an incomplete module of object description (in the tool, the expression coverage of the object concept is not wide enough) and the usability problems of K-MADe’s specific interface. This paper presents a study on the object expression coverage. From case studies, we identify limitations and we infer modification on the K-MADe object entity definitions. These modifications aim to increase the expressive power of objects.

This paper describes an approach to adapt the use-case point estimation method to fit the requirements of agile development of interactive software. Creating product cost estimates early in the development lifecycle is a challenge for the software industry, they require substantial data from past projects and constant feedback and fine-tuning, which are rarely available or consistent through interactive software development. In addition, the profusion of incremental and evolutionary development methods (like Scrum and XP) produced new challenges with estimating frequent releases. Here we propose several changes to the original use-case point estimation method, in particular to take advantage of the enhanced information that can be extracted from usage-centered design (usageCD) that devotes particular attention to critical aspects like weighting actors and uses-cases for complexity. We propose to exploit user-roles, essential use-cases and the usageCD architecture to enhance the weighting heuristics for assigning complexity factors to actors and use-cases required to calculate the unadjusted use-case point reflecting the complexity of the requirements for a given iteration or evolution. We propose to exploit user-roles as the main basis for weighting complex actors, which originally are grouped in the highest weight factor. Conversely we propose to extract the complexity of use-cases from essential use case steps depicted through user intentions and system responsibilities and also the analysis classes extract from those for the usageCD architecture. Detailing this approach the paper presents a contribution, not only to leverage more accurate early lifecycle software estimation, but also to bridge the gap between SE and HCI enabling cross-fertilization between the two disciplines.

User interfaces (UI) for data systems has been a technical and human interaction research question for a long time. Today these user interfaces require dynamic automation and run-time generation to properly deal with on a large-scale. This paper presents an agent-based framework, i.e., a methodological process, a meta-model and a computer software to drive the automatic database user interface design and code behind generation from the task model, context model and domain model combined together. This includes both the user interface and the basic functions of the database application.