Describing the User

Software and system specification is all about modeling users. Sometimes this modeling is implicit as with storyboards and extended scenarios. Other times the modeling is explicit as when use cases and their structured scenarios describe what a user must be able to accomplish with a system.

This topic area is concerned with the fundamental content of all of these descriptions of the user and their world. This topic area proposes one set of fundamental constructs that can be used in constructing a pattern language of user interface design or in modeling user interface architectures.

Who Should Read this Discussion?

• Usability professionals and framework designers who would like a deeper understanding of the basis of pattern languages of UI design.
• Usability professionals who are making UI architecture decisions.
• Usability professionals, architects, or business process modelers who wish to model their development process and who want a more formal understanding of the content of HCI artifacts.

What Will I Learn from this Discussion?

• The HCI concepts usability professionals employ to describe users, user tasks, user concepts, and user interface.
• How these HCI concepts relate to each other.
• One approach to modeling these concepts.
• This section also sets the stage for models of UI design patterns using these concepts.

This topic area explores the content of a model of the user. This topic area consists of one linear text flow with these pieces:

1. Overview
2. Users and their Organizations
3. User Domain
4. User Tasks
5. User Interface
6. Wrap-up Discussion

Background Needed

The discussion is based on object modeling and illustrates concepts with UML diagraming constructs. You do not need to understand UML notation or even object modeling to benefit from this discussion. If you do not have an understanding of UML and object modeling, consider browsing the UML topic first.

Caveats

This is not a methods discussion—this is a description of the content HCI methods generate.

This discussion of user modeling makes use of the Entity, Task, and Presenter (ETP) UI architecture's classification scheme as discussed in ETP UI Architecture. You need not understand ETP to benefit from this discussion.

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