Rich-IDM: Extending IDM to Model Rich Internet Applications

Rich Internet Applications (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, to explore and specify design decisions at the light of usability requirements and stakeholder’s goals. To meet this challenge, we codify a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIA. We demonstrate through a case study the promising advantages of our approach: 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.