SIGIA-L Mail Archives: RE: SIGIA-L: IA notation
RE: SIGIA-L: IA notation
From: Gent, Andrew (Andrew.Gent_at_compaq.com)
Date: Wed Jun 28 2000 - 23:20:40 EDT
>While I agree that some aspects of UML might find valuable
>application in modeling information architectures that are strongly
>dependent upon data models, I have reservations about the
>practicality of UML in the broader area of modeling user
experience.
>
>The UML component that seems most applicable, the use case diagram,
>seems insufficiently holistic to capture the complexities of
>contemporary architectures in which hypertextual information spaces
>and interactive functionality are intermingled.
I am so glad you said that. I was running into the problem that
whenever I mentioned "user scenarios" to engineers as a mechanism for
communicating the intended or expected use of a system they would say "oh
yes, use cases." As a result, for one project, I took a crash course
(figuratively speaking) in UML and delivered a requirements document for a
fairly simple KM system using use cases. Although it was an interesting
experiment, the resulting spec did a very poor job of communicating the
"meaning" of the expected transactions. Use cases also provide little or no
mechanism for identifying the relative emphasis on one data flow over
another.
A standard notation for describing the structure of a design would
be useful and UML as a notation (minus the current semantics of a
representation such as use cases) could serve as a good starting point.
However, in the meantime I have gone back to representative (as
opposed to complete) written usage scenarios for capturing requirements; and
paper prototypes (of page layouts and the first 2-3 levels of structure) for
communicating designs. Other than with professinal writers and designers,
paper mockups seem to have far more communicative impact than detailed
"maps". They also tend to avoid bickering arguments over nits and tend to
elicit "big" questions about the design.
Andrew Gent
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