Conveying human-computer interaction concerns to software engineers through an interaction model

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of efficiently representing and communicating decisions about human-computer interaction to collaborate with software engineers. It describes and illustrates in a case study how an interaction modeling language based on the semiotic engineering of human-computer interaction may be used to derive a skeleton of certain UML diagrams, namely: use case, class, and sequence diagrams. Our goal is to provide a clear representation of the interactive exchanges that may take place, in order to prevent human-computer interaction decisions to be lost or inadvertently overruled when designing the system architecture and internal functional behavior.