Sophie Dupuy-Chessa

A survey of model driven engineering tools for user interface design

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 (HCI) domain uses specific models and tools. In another way, the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach has been proposed in software engineering domain in order to provide techniques and tools for dealing with models in an automated way. MDE approach is based on models, meta-models, models transformation and models weaving and aims to produce productive models, i.e. models concentrated on their generative power. Considering these two domains and the already existing HCI works in MDE, the goal of this paper is to understand actual HCI design needs and to study how MDE tools can support HCI needs. As a first response, it proposes a survey of existing MDE tools in regards to HCI model management.

Evaluating Choreographies in BPMN 2.0 Using an Extended Quality Framework

The notion of choreography has emerged over the past years as a foundational concept for capturing and managing collaborative business processes. This concept has been adopted as a first-class citizen in the latest version of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN 2.0). However, it remains an open question whether or not BPMN 2.0 is actually appropriate for capturing choreographies. In this paper, we shed light into this question by extending an existing language evaluation framework in order to cover the specificities of choreographies, and applying the extended evaluation framework to BPMN 2.0. Among others, the evaluation identifies a number of issues in BPMN 2.0 that affect the perceptual discriminability of certain choreography modelling constructs. These deficiencies could potentially affect the comprehensibility of models and lead to confusion, particularly among novice users. Recommendations for addressing these deficiencies are put forward.

QUIMERA: a quality metamodel to improve design rationale

With the increasing complexity of User Interfaces (UI) it is more and more necessary to make users understand the UI. We promote a Model-Driven approach to improve the perceived quality through an explicit and observable design rationale. The design rationale is the logical reasons given to justify a designed artifact. The design decisions are not taken arbitrarily, but following some criteria. We propose a Quality Metamodel to justify these decisions along a Model-Driven Engineering approach.

Test of the ICARE platform fusion mechanism

Multimodal interactive systems offer a flexibility of interaction that increases their complexity. ICARE is a component-based approach to specify and develop multimodal interfaces using a fusion mechanism in a modality independent way. As ICARE is being reused to produce several multimodal applications, we want to ensure the correctness of its fusion mechanism. Therefore, we validated it using a test architecture based on Java technologies. This paper presents our validation approach, its results, its advantages and its limits.

HCI and business practices in a collaborative method for augmented reality systems

Context: Every interactive system is composed of a functional core and a user interface. However, the software engineering (SE) and human-computer interaction (HCI) communities do not share the same methods, models or tools. This usually induces a large work overhead when specialists from the two domains try to connect their applicative studies, especially when developing augmented reality systems that feature complex interaction cores. Objective: We present in this paper the essential activities and concepts of a development method integrating the SE and HCI development practices, from the specifications down to the design, as well as their application on a case study. Method: The efficiency of the method was tested in a qualitative study involving four pairs of SE and HCI experts in the design of an application for which an augmented reality interaction would provide better user performance than a classic interactive system. The effectivity of the method was evaluated in a qualitative study comparing the quality of three implementations of the same application fragment (based on the same analysis model), using software engineering metrics. Results: The first evaluation confirmed the ease of use of our method and the relevance of our tools for guiding the design process, but raised concerns on the handling of conflicting collaborative activities. The second evaluation gave indications that the structure of the analysis model facilitates the implementation of quality software (in terms of coupling, stability and complexity). Conclusion: It is concluded that our method enables design teams with different backgrounds in application development to collaborate for integrating augmented reality applications with information systems. Areas of improvement are also described.

Quality in ubiquitous information system design

Information systems become ubiquitous. This opens a large spectrum of the possibilities for the end-users, but the design complexity is increasing. Therefore insuring quality during design is more than ever a challenge. In this article, we study this challenge by identifying the specificities of ubiquitous computing design and by considering the influence of these specificities on the quality of the various aspects of information system design (models, languages, processes and tools). For each aspect, we discuss its requirements on quality and present related works valuable for the definition and the evaluation of ubiquitous information system design quality.

Towards A System of Patterns for the Design of Multimodal Interfaces

Since R. Bolt’s seminal “Put that there” demonstrator, more and more robust and innovative modalities can be used and empirical work on the usage of multiple modalities is now available for guiding the design of efficient and usable multimodal interfaces. This paper presents a system of patterns for capitalizing and formalizing this design knowledge about multimodal interfaces as patterns. Patterns are used for illustrating our system of patterns.

Equivalence checking for comparing user interfaces

Plastic User Interfaces (UIs) have the capacity to adapt to changes in their context of use while preserving usability. This exposes users to different versions of UIs that can diverge from each other at several levels, which may cause loss of consistency. This raises the question of similarity between UIs. This paper proposes an approach to comparing UIs by measuring to what extent UIs have the same interaction capabilities and appearance. We use the equivalence checking formal method. The approach verifies whether two UI models are equivalent or not. When they are not equivalent, the UI divergences are listed, thus providing the possibility of leaving them out of the analysis. In this case, the two UIs are said equivalent modulo such divergences. Furthermore, the approach shows that one UI can contain at least all interaction capabilities of another. We apply the approach to a case study in the nuclear power plant domain in which several UI versions are analyzed, and the equivalence and inclusion relations are demonstrated.

A Software Engineering Method for the Design of Mixed Reality Systems

The domain of mixed reality systems is currently making decisive advances on a daily basis. However, the knowledge and know-how of HCI scientists and interaction engineers, used in the design of such systems, are not well understood. This chapter addresses this issue by proposing a software engineering method that couples a process for designing mixed reality interaction with a process for developing the functional core. Our development method features a Y-shaped development cycle that separates the description of functional requirements and their analysis from the study of technical requirements of the application. These sub-processes produce Business Objects and Interactional Objects, which are connected to produce a complete mixed reality system. The whole process is presented via a case study, with a particular emphasis on the design of the interactive solution.

Une approche générique pour l'adaptation dynamique des IHM au contexte

The contexts of use vary a lot. It becomes fundamental to adapt user interfaces (UI) to the context. In this article, we choose an approach based on models for UI adaptation. Our approach facilitates the adaptation through a generic and flexible specification of the task tree model. This specification takes into account both similarities and existent variations between different users contexts of the same application. Such models are afterwards adjusted by model transformation such as the Model Driven Engineering (MDE [6]), according to the user situation.