UML

This topic focuses on the UML (Unified Modeling Language) from the HCI practitioner's perspective.

Who Should Read this Discussion?

• Usability professionals and managers who would like an overview of UML from the perspective of user requirements and system specification.
• Usability professionals or business analysts who are performing task and domain analysis to support system specification and user interface design.
• Usability professionals who are designing user interface.
• Usability professionals, business analysts, and quality assurance engineers involved in testing and requirements verification.
• OOAD practitioners who would like to better understand what HCI practitioner's bring to the practice of software engineering.

What Will I Learn from this Discussion?

• You will learn a core set of UML notation and modeling useful in day-to-day commercial HCI practice.
• You will learn enough about UML notation to read the diagrammatic content of this site. This will serve as an introduction to a simple subset of UML.

UML Modeling

The following three modeling activities form the core of a combined HCI and object-technology approach to specification and user interface design. They are key to understanding content throughout the remainder of this site.

• Use Case Diagrams: the abstract description of user task composition and flow.
• Scenarios, Sequence Diagrams, and Narrative Text: the concrete description of user tasks.
• Class Diagrams: the description of user domain concepts.

And a fourth topic introduces some of the pragmatics of making use of UML in day-to-day practice.

• UML Tools: not strictly speaking a method description, this is a short discussion of tools available for the creation of UML diagrams and for managing UML models.

The following methods complete an overview of UML-based notation for HCI practice. The targeted time of publication is listed alongside each method.

• Class Diagrams: Defining Tasks: use of concept diagramming to summarize task content and requirements. 3Q2003
• Class Diagrams: Defining Presentation: use of concept diagramming to summarize user interface content and requirements. 3Q2003
• Activity Diagrams: concrete description of task flow. 3Q2003
• State Diagrams: description of (concept) behavior. 3Q2003
• User Profiling: an overview of user populations and organizations. 2Q2003
• Rich Picture Diagrams: describe the world-context for one user (population). This is an adaptation, formalized in UML, of Andrew Monk's technique. 3Q2003
• Modeling User Interface: options to fit the pragmatics of a range of projects. 4Q2003