Mobile-IDM: A Design Method for Modeling the New Interaction Style of Mobile ApplicationsEngineering the Web in the Big Data Era

Mobile applications (apps) offer designers the opportunity to experi- ment with novel interaction grammars (e.g., gestures, context-aware events), whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. The research panorama only proposes a few design methods for apps, which are mainly released as extensions of existing ones. This, in addition to the short lifecycle that characterizes apps, leads to the risk of inappropriate modeling techniques being adopted. To bridge this gap, we propose a new design method, named Mobile-IDM, to model the interaction between the user and the app from a logical point of view. As it is based upon IDM and Rich-IDM, from which it inherits its design semantics, Mobile-IDM exploits the dialog metaphor to faci- litate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engi- neers to obtain good usability of the interaction. We demonstrate through a case study the simplicity and other advantages of our approach.