Book Description
Nowadays, the advent of the wireless Internet and the rapid expanding of novel technologies on the mass market have represented a tremendous stimulus for pushing the development of interactive systems able to encompass support for a larger and larger variety of users, tasks, devices and contexts. In this thesis we present the benefits of using task models in the various steps of the lifecycle of an interactive application. Indeed, we show how they can play an important role in the requirements elicitation phase for example, by requiring precise definition of temporal relationships between the different activities that should be performed, so avoiding any ambiguities. Furthermore, we describe how task models may be exploited in software development beyond early analysis as they can provide valuable information for the design of interactive applications through a number of criteria specifying how to use the data contained in task models to drive the design of the user interface. Additionally, we analyse how they can be used for verification purposes, in order to check some properties of the modelled system (in combination with other models), so improving the level of confidence towards the system, which can be relevant especially in safety-critical contexts. Lastly, we show the benefits that can be gained from using task models in the usability evaluation phase, through a systematic analysis of the impact that the deviations from an expected task plan could have on the quality of the overall system.
