Modeling the user interface of web applications with UML

Abstract

Today's User Interfaces (UIs) are complex software components, which play an essential role in the usability of an application. The development of UIs requires therefore, not only guidelines and best practice reports, but also a development process including the elaboration of visual models and a standardized notation for this visualization. Based on a UML extension for Web applications of previous work, we are focusing in this paper on the user interface design of Web applications, describing in detail the methodological steps – part of the UWE design process – to transform a model of the navigation into a user interface model. We propose a UML profile for the Web, which supports sketching and storyboarding (techniques that are widely used by UI designers without a precise notation). The strength of the UML models presented is given by the fact that they provide a precise notation and can be used as a basis for a semi-automatic generation of UI templates for Web applications.