Software Engineering

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CHAPTER 13 
Software Design Synthesis Practice
drop-down menus or buttons, are structural design widgets of which the behavior 
facilitates user interactions with the software product.
During the conceptualization of the design solution user interface mechanisms 
should be abstract in nature to provide a placeholder for further design delineation. 
The conceptual design solution should not invoke user interface drawings, mock-
ups, or prototyping since it may be premature to elect design preferences. The user 
interface mechanisms must be fashioned to facilitate user interactions with the soft-
ware product, and therefore necessitates the application of human factors and ergo-
nomic
1
 analysis (physical, cognitive, organizational, and environmental) to devise 
appropriate human–software interactions.
As the structural design solution advances, the user interface may need to be 
accentuated to promote stakeholder consensus as to the suitability of the mecha-
nisms, their arrangement, and appearances. Prototyping the user interface should 
be the last course of action taken in an attempt to garner stakeholder acceptance of 
a proposed user interface design solution. Developing a user interface prototype is 
a considerable undertaking that results in a tangible, observable mockup or visual 
representation of the graphical display mechanisms. Every prototype represents 
a significant investment by the project that may be extravagant given the avail-
ability of alternative approaches to portraying the user interface design solution. 
Prototyping is analogous to software development in terms of the effort to specify 
the scope of the prototype, design the it architecturally, and implement (design, code, 
test, and integrate) it.
The following types of design representation should be considered before elect-
ing to develop a costly, time-consuming user interface prototyping effort:
1. 
Illustrating
, which establishes illustrated or computer-generated graphical repre-
sentations of the individual user interface (UI) mechanisms.
2. 
Content mapping, which identifies the relationships and manner of traversing 
among UI mechanisms. Extremely useful in representing information display 
and data input form layouts.
3. 
Storyboarding
, which is used to express the progressive UI screens that the soft-
ware will render to demonstrate the user experience. Storyboards can be used to 
sketch UI design concepts that correspond to individual operational processes.
4. 
Modeling
, which is the generation of UI mechanisms or screens within auto-
mated design tools to enable UI graphics to be rapidly generated and modified. 
These UI models can be used to capture stakeholder feedback at a reasonable 
cost, which contributes to the specification of UI design mechanisms. The final 
UI design documentation and diagrams can be generated by the automated 
toolset.
1 
See 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_factors_and_ergonomics
 for more on human–system/
human–computer interactions as forms of cognitive economics. The term 
human–software interac-
tion
 is used here to address the factors that affect the design of software products.

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