Advanced Interaction:
Formalising Design Patterns
Investigators: Russell Beale, Bezhad Bordbar
It is recognised that creating effective, usable interactive systems is a highly non-trivial task. One approach to supporting developers and designers is through the use of HCI design patterns - this is now recognised as an effective way to produce usable systems. Design patterns capture the key elements of a design, providing a library of approaches that are known to work, though most design patterns are at best only semi-formal, providing outline structures that are filled in with discursive text and/or images.Our research has focused on finding an approach to make patterns a much more accessible part of the user interface design process, with the eventual goal of providing a CASE tool that incorporates interactive systems pattern knowledge and hence can support good design practice. We use a UML/OCL approach that captures not only the software architectural characteristics of the system but also its interface realisation, and hence forms a formal representation of many of the elements of an HCI design pattern.