Multimodal Modelling Languages to Reduce Visual Overload in UML Diagrams

It is normally easier to build a program when the design issues are fully understood. One way of doing this is to form a “mental map” or visualisation of the problem space. Visualisation is an increasingly important method for people to understand complex information, to navigate around structured information and to aid in software design. Software visualisation techniques are usually tackled from a graphical point of view. Some similarities exist between spatial hypertext applications and software visualisation techniques. A limitation of both of these is that when the amount of information becomes large enough, users may experience visual overload. This paper suggests using multimodal cues to reduce this.