Temporal patterns for complex interaction design

Abstract

Patterns have emerged as a useful organising mechanism for component re-use in Software Engineering. There is, however, less agreement about how patterns might be used in the Human-Computer Interaction design process. In this paper we look at one way that patterns might be used to augment an existing user interface design notation. XUAN is a useful notation for expressing temporal problems in interaction. However, XUAN has showed its limitations in the design process, requiring the repeated description of common situations. This notation bureaucracy makes it hard to redesign during the UI development process. To overcome this limitation, we proposed the exploitation of the pattern technique. The combination of pattern language and XUAN is PUAN. The PUAN inherits most features of XUAN and also, like patterns, can be reused where tasks repeatedly occur in scenarios. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.