The Systematic Generation of Statechart from Functional Relations and Scenarios for Prototyping User Interfaces
Akihiko Urushihara, Satoshi Kanai, Takeshi Kishinami, Toyoaki Tomura · 2005
Designing user interface (UI) behaviour can be regarded as a mapping from product functions and a set of UI control scenarios to state-transition-based UI specification. However, in current UI prototyping tools, UI designers must di- rectly describe the UI specification from scratch, and the specification is not explicitly related to the product functions. In this paper, we present a Behav- iour Modeller to systematically support this mapping process. In the model- ler, required functional relations of the product are modelled as a functional re- lation diagram (FRD), while UI control scenarios are modelled as sequence diagrams (SDs). The UI element Statechart (SC) templates are also introduced to enable efficient generation of the specification. The modeller automatically generates an SC as the complete state-transition-based UI specification from an FRD, SDs and templates. The designer can easily modify a complex SC only by inserting or removing functions in the FRD and by changing the sce- nario in SDs. The effectiveness of the method and tool was confirmed by ap- plication to UI design for consumer products.