Using Storyboards to Integrate Models and Informal Design Knowledge

Abstract

Model-driven development of user interfaces has become increasingly powerful in recent years. Unfortunately, model-driven approaches have the inherent limitation that they cannot handle the informal nature of some of the artifacts used in truly multidisciplinary user interface development such as storyboards, sketches, scenarios and personas. In this chapter, we present an approach and tool support for multidisciplinary user interface development bridging informal and formal artifacts in the design and development process. Key features of the approach are the usage of annotated storyboards, which can be connected to other models through an underlying meta-model, and cross-toolkit design support based on an abstract user interface model.

Visual Methods for the Design of Shape-Changing Interfaces

“…Sketches are also cheap to produce, and are an inclusive way of generating output as they require only access to a pen and paper and have additional cognitive benets [13]. Sketching also has an established place in the design of user interfaces (UI), giving rise to computer-based UI design programs which either utilise, or appear to be sketches and storyboards [18] [28] and can be annotated or embedded with metadata [19]. Storyboards used in the design process can also lead to more eective design [60] or help communicate research ndings [22].…”

Timisto

“…Given the wide diversity of notations and tools, synchronizing the various efforts is cumbersome [7]. Informal design artifacts are very accessible to non-technical people and often only require pen and paper [4,13]. Storyboarding is such an informal technique that is frequently used for the design of interactive systems [14] and that will be the basic notation for the contributions described in this paper.…”

“…There is no explicit model that is agreed upon, and the information in storyboards is therefore not accessible to computers. Further comments or graphical annotations may be added to improve understanding among members of the design team [4,16]. Without formal semantics, the content remains difficult if not impossible to process by a computer [12].…”

“…Without formal semantics, the content remains difficult if not impossible to process by a computer [12]. Providing tool support that would allow to automatically infer new information from the knowledge base or transform model to other modeling languages is therefore complex and not possible [4,8,12,13]. There is already a lot of temporal information available in storyboards that can be extracted.…”

“…Haesen et al explored the technique of storyboarding as part of the engineering process [4,8], but to our knowledge there is no well-defined way to translate system behavior as described in a storyboard in such a way it can be adopted by other software engineering artifacts such as a process model. We argue that the behavior of interactive software equals the set of ordering that can be found in a storyboard.…”