Section: New Results
Formal Design and Validation of the Dialogue in Interactive Software
Participant : Dominique Scapin.
This work was carried out in collaboration with the University of Poitiers and ENSMA (S. Caffiau, P. Girard). It is a follow up on previous collaborative efforts that ended up with the creation of K-MAD and SUIDT. The main thrust of the work has been described in an international journal [20] .
Task analysis is a critical step in the design process of interactive systems. The large set of task models available today may lead to the assumption that this step is well supported. However, very few task models are tool-supported. And in this latter category, few of them are based on a clear semantics. An assessment of the features that have been considered as essential in task modeling has been made by comparing different tool-supported methods, and evaluating the actual use of these features in K-MADe, a tool aimed at contributing to the incorporation of ergonomics into the design process of interactive systems through activity and task analysis. The analysis shows that :
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The originality of the K-MADe tool is to be based on a model whose expressive power lies on computable syntax while trying to be usable by every modelling knowledge designer.
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This facilitates task description and analysis, but also model query and the migration within software engineering models and software lifecycle steps.
Evaluation results demonstrate the usefulness of an increased expressive power for task models, and their acceptance by users. They also enlighten some weaknesses in the K-MAD method and suggest further improvements. Other papers have been published on the results obtained, focusing on learning, assessment, and process issues, such as, respectively:[23] , [25] , [26] .
