Adopting a communication-centered design approach to support interdisciplinary design teams

UML has become a de facto standard in software industry, and many attempts to bridge the gap between software engineering (SE) and human-computer interaction (HCI) have extended UML to incorporate HCI elements and concerns into the software development process. However, by adopting a representation which springs mainly from a single disciplinary field, communication among the design team members is hindered and software engineers’ values prevail. We argue that, in order to truly bridge the communication gap among design team members, we need a more “neutral” common ground. We propose to use an interaction model to represent the designers’ vision of how the system should behave. We describe MoLIC, a modeling language for interaction as conversation, as a language that may play the role of this common representation.