Model-based Engineering of Feedforward Usability Function for GUI Widgets

Abstract

Feedback and feedforward are two fundamental mechanisms that support users' activities while interacting with computing devices. While feedback can be easily solved by providing information to the users following the triggering of an action, feedforward is much more complex as it must provide information before an action is performed. For interactive applications where making a mistake has more impact than just reduced user comfort, correct feedforward is an essential step toward correctly informed, and thus safe, usage. Our approach, Fortunettes, is a generic mechanism providing a systematic way of designing feedforward addressing both action and presentation problems. Including a feedforward mechanism significantly increases the complexity of the interactive application hardening developers' tasks to detect and correct defects. We build upon an existing formal notation based on Petri Nets for describing the behavior of interactive applications and present an approach that allows for adding correct and consistent feedforward. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS • This paper proposes a formal approach for the engineering of Fortunettes, which is a graphical design of feedforward added to user interface widgets. • As adding Fortunettes to user interface widgets is a complex and cumbersome task, this paper presents a formal description technique, a process and a CASE tool to support the addition of Fortunettes on an interactive application. • The paper demonstrates that adding usability functions (such as feedforward) adds a lot of code to the interactive application thus making the application more vulnerable to software faults introduced at development time. The proposed approach compensates this by proposing a 3-fold engineering technique:-a reusable pattern model for feedforward,-the expression of this pattern using a formal description technique,-a process for adding the feedforward pattern to an existing interactive application