Sharing human-computer interaction and software engineering design artifacts

Abstract

Software engineering (SE) and human computer interaction (HCI) disciplines typically have separate processes and design artifacts. The paper describes a coevolutionary design process, which incorporates both SE and HCI processes, and indicates how design artifacts can be usefully shared throughout the development of an interactive product. We show how scenarios in particular can serve as a bridge between the two disciplines. We present a tool called Scenic Vista that is a prototype for a development environment of linked SE and HCI design artifacts. The design artifacts in Scenic Vista are: task hierarchies, textual scenarios, Unified Modelling Language (UML) sequence diagrams, and ClockWorks user interface architectures.