Dialogue-based Modeling of Rich Internet Applications: The Rich-IDM Approach

Purpose – Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction and navigation in ways that allow web engineers to share through a common vocabulary, as well as sketch, explore and specify design decisions in the light of usability requirements and stakeholder’s goals. The purpose of this paper is to address this problem. Design/methodology/approach – To meet this challenge, the authors extend IDM (Interactive Dialogue Model), a dialogue-based approach focusing on the conceptual dialogue flow with the user, codifying a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIAs. Findings – The approach, called Rich-IDM demonstrated some relevant features: expressiveness to capture interactive features at a high level of abstraction, semi-formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engineers, and traceability of the design to important usability requirements. Research limitations/implications – The paper proposes a simple way to fill the gap between hypermedia design and user experience design for RIAs, which is an open issue, both from the web engineering point of view and the human-computer interaction point of view. Practical implications – The authors have described how Rich-IDM can help designers to capture and cope with some RIA interface flaws. In this case, the benefits of the approach are directly related to the semantics of its primitives. Originality/value – The authors’ proposal is the first, consolidated step of a promising research avenue.