Eliciting User Interface Requirements and Deriving Usability Problems from Scenario Textual Descriptions

Scenario Textual Descriptions (STD) are general-purpose natural language descriptions of a narrative scenario of end users, real or potential, using an existing or a future interactive system. STDs may take many forms: use cases, structured scenarios, user stories, and natural language expressions of user actions. As such, these STDs contain useful information for initiating the development life cycle of a user interface of this interactive system. On the one hand, when the end user expresses some interaction through these STDs, user interface requirements can be elicited by deriving model fragments from them: user model, task model, domain model, process model, etc. On the other hand, when the end user refers to any previously used system to feed the requirements, usability problems can be derived from user interfaces critiques: usability problems by interaction object, by dialogue box or window, by entire application. Both approaches feed a bidirectional approach where requirements and usability problems co-exist in the same STD. This article presents how FlowiXML supports the entire approach based on a real-world case studyfor a distributed system for managing teaching students.