Improving the Web Application Design Process with UIDs

In this paper, we present a diagrammatic technique to represent the information exchange during the interaction between the user and the application called User Interaction Diagram (UID). UIDs have proven to be a valuable technique to gather requirements since they describe the exchange of information in a high level of abstraction, without considering specific user interface aspects and design details. UIDs can be incorporated into the web application design process. During the requirements gathering, they can be used to represent the requirements; during the conceptual design, they serve as a basis for the synthesis of a preliminary class diagram using heuristic guidelines. Moreover, during the navigation design, additional heuristic guidelines can be used to specify partial context schemas from UIDs.