User
Interaction and Interface Design with UML
Group of Information Systems
University
of Almeria, SPAIN
{jalmen,liribarne}@ual.es
The Unified Modeling
Language (UML) provides system architects working on analysis and
design (A&D) with one
consistent language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and
documenting
the artifacts of software systems, as well as for the business
modeling. The
user interface (UI), as a significant part of most applications, should
also be
modeled using UML. In this paper, we describe how to use and specialize
UML
diagrams in order to describe the user interfaces of a software system.
Use
case diagrams are used for extracting the main user interfaces. Use
cases are described
by means of user-interaction diagrams, an special kind of activity
diagrams in
which states represent data output actions and transitions represents
data
input events. Input and output interactions in the user-interaction
diagrams
help the designer to extract the Graphical User Interface (GUI)
components used
in each user interface. A new and specialized version of the use case
diagram
for representing the user interface design —called user-interface
diagram— and
a class diagram for GUI components —called GUI-class diagram— are
obtained. The
user-interaction, user-interface and GUI-class diagrams, can be seen as
the
UML-based User Interface models of the system. Finally, GUI prototypes
can be
generated from GUI-class diagrams. As case study of our technique, we
will
describe an Internet book shopping system.
