Formalising Interaction Patterns

The use of patterns as a way to refer to common solutions in the field of interface design is becoming widespread. However, contrary to the situation for software patterns, definitions of interaction patterns do not enjoy a common standard yet. Moreover, patterns are developed for design aspects as diverse as: user experience, layout, action coordination, or specification of entire widgets, reflecting the complexity of the field. As a consequence, research on formalisation of interaction patterns is not developed, and few attempts have been made to extend techniques developed for design pattern formalisation. We show here how an extension to an approach to pattern formalisation recently proposed by the authors can be usefully employed to formalize some classes of interaction patterns, to express relations like subtyping and composition, and to detect conflicts.