A design methodology for multimodal interactive systems: a pragmatical approach

A methodology is described to design and generate virtual environments that a) support the activities of practitioners skilled with the experimental knowledge of their specific domain; b) offer multimodal interaction styles customized to the culture and skills of the target community of practitioners; c) are tailorable, customizable and adaptive to the context of activity; d) support the exchange of information among users of different communities; e) support the gathering of usability data from the field and from the designer's work. The methodology is based on a network of software shaping workshops for designing and developing multimodal interactive systems. Each workshop can be customized to and tailorable by the members of a community according to their performing task. In the methodology's perspective, each member of the design team (software engineers, HCI experts and domain-experts) is provided with an appropriate workshop, a virtual environment which can be accessed both from desktop and mobile devices and allows workers to manage and share a knowledge repository. The implemented workshops are described using an XUL-based language, which permits the functional specification of e-documents: this specification is materialized in different ways and with different languages (SVG, HTML) according to the device in use. The network of workshops which is at the base of the methodology, has been developed following a pragmatical path through different specific pilot domains which suggested functionalities to be added step by step.