A model to support designers of collaborative systems in anticipating scenarios

Abstract

Nowadays collaborative systems often present users with flexibility to customize different aspects according to their contexts or needs. Designers of these systems must define the possible customizations to be offered to users at design time. To do so, they have to decide what choices to make available to users, and consider which scenarios may be generated by users' decisions and their impact over time in other users' interactions. In this paper, we propose a modeling language that supports designers in this activity by allowing them to describe users' choices and actions over time and their impacts. Based on this description a scenario generator describes the situations that users can create by their choices. Exploring the scenarios generated at design time, the designer can inspect if any of the scenarios represent undesirable situations for end users. A preliminary evaluation of the model is presented and discussed.