[Sigia-l] Useful tools

[Whitney Quesenbery]

At 09:19 AM 7/17/2003 +0800, Dr. Marios Pittas wrote:
>UI  designers do not use UML notation to document their UI's. They might use
>task analysis (in one form or another), screens, screen flow diagrams etc.
>but to my knowledge and experience not UML..

A group at IBM created a notational language for interaction design called 
OVID that was loosely similar to UML. It was published as a book, so should 
be available.

I've worked on several UML-driven projects in which we worked on how to 
relate the UI documentation to the UML and other engineering documents.

Without going into long detail here, what we came up with was the need to 
synchronize the two sets of docs at critical points. For example, before 
detailed screen design began, we made sure that we understood how the 
screen flow diagrams related to the state models and use cases.

The team process map looked like a series of mirrored loops, with clear 
touch points:

System () UI
System () UI

The phases roughly matched task analysis, design concept, high level 
navigation/screen flow, detailed design.

Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Interactive Design, LLC
w. www.WQusability.com
e. whitneyq at wqusability.com
p. 908-638-5467

UPA  - www.upassoc.org
STC Usability SIG: www.stcsig.org/usability