Multi-facet Design of Interactive Systems through Visual Languages

In this chapter, it is recognized that the knowledge relevant to the design of an interactive system is distributed among several stakeholders: domain experts, software engineers, and humancomputer interaction experts. Hence, the design of an interactive system is a multi-facet activity requiring the collaboration of experts from these communities. Each community describes an interactive system through visual sentences of a visual language (VL). A first VL allows domain experts to reason on the system usage in their specific activities. A second VL, the state-chart language, is used to specify the system behavior for software engineers' purposes. A communication gap exists among the two communities in that domain experts do not understand software engineers jargon and vice versa. To overcome this gap, a third VL permits human-computer interaction experts to translate the user view of the system embedded in their visual language into a specification in the software engineering visual language.