E/R Based Scenario Modeling for Rapid Prototyping of Web Information Services

In the design of information services for the web, developing navigation structure is one of the most crucial and time consuming tasks. Inappropriate navigation structure usually rejects users who can be considered as an indicator for the service quality. Adapting navigation structure after the implementation of the system is often too expensive (in terms of time and effort). To support the designer in this task, we propose a prototyping approsich. The designer is enabled to incompletely specify user scenarios which serve to derive early prototypes, but also to Eilter and refine them during the design process. As a basis, we use the entity/relationship model. It carries information about data types and semantical knowledge of the application domain as associations between types. Through a specification process, user scenarios are derived from the schema by creating navigation structures. Therefore, we introduce a basis to specify user scenarios, a rule system used for defining derivation rules, and propose several heuristical rules which exploit semantics from the E/R schema to refine scenario specifications.