Prototypes are often used to clarify and evaluate design alternatives for a graphical user interface. They help stakeholders to decide on different aspects by making them visible and concrete. This is a highly iterative process in which the prototypes evolve into a design artifact that is close enough to the envisioned result to be implemented. People with different roles are involved in prototyping. Our claim is that integrated or inter-operable tools help design information propagate among people while prototyping and making the transition more accurately into the software development phase.We make a first step towards such a solution by offering a framework, GRIP, in which such a tool should fit. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of the framework by using it to classify existing tools for prototyping and implementing a limited prototyping tool, GRIP-it, which can be integrated into the overall process.

Abstract. Many industrial applications have large and complex interfaces that grow incrementally over time. Typically, these interfaces will be used by people with different user profiles. The combination of these facts demands a software methodology and tool support that ideally allow consistency checks and configuration in order to avoid a system to become unusable. In this paper, we present an approach in which task models are used throughout the design and development cycle up to the final application. The task model is not only used at design time, but is also used to check for potential problems with e.g. consistency during configuration of the final application.

ICT tools and working methods are important to effectively work together in cross-organizational, multi-disciplinary projects. At the moment, there is no or very limited support to enable sharing knowledge about which ICT tools to use for collaboration and how to use them. In this paper we propose CoFra, a collaboration framework that facilitates stakeholders to share knowledge about ICT tools and work practices to improve the collaboration in dispersed multidisciplinary teams. CoFra supports two main mechanisms: collaboration variables identifying characteristics of ICT tools and workflow to express best practices. Two prototype applications were created based upon the framework. A first user evaluation of these prototype applications shows that (1) the defined collaboration variables used are relevant and useful in the selection of ICT tool support and (2) that workflow depiction can improve knowledge sharing practices over traditional wiki usage.

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