Video as a By-Product of Digital Prototyping: Capturing the Dynamic Aspect of Interaction

Requirements engineering provides several practices to analyze how a user wants to interact with a future software. Mockups, prototypes, and scenarios are suitable to understand usability issues and user requirements early. Nevertheless, users are often dissatisfied with the usability of a resulting software. Apparently, previously explored information was lost or no longer accessible during the development phase. Scenarios are one effective practice to describe behavior. However, they are commonly notated in natural language which is often improper to capture and communicate interaction knowledge comprehensible to developers and users. The dynamic aspect of interaction is lost if only static descriptions are used. Digital prototyping enables the creation of interactive prototypes by adding responsive controls to hand-or digitally drawn mockups. We propose to capture the events of these controls to obtain a representation of the interaction. From this data, we generate videos, which demonstrate interaction sequences, as additional support for textual scenarios. Variants of scenarios can be created by modifying the captured event sequences and mockups. Any change is unproblematic since videos only need to be regenerated. Thus, we achieve video as a by-product of digital prototyping. This reduces the effort compared to video recording such as screencasts. A first evaluation showed that such a generated video supports a faster understanding of a textual scenario compared to static mockups.

I. Introduction

The most important requirements engineering goals are to create a shared understanding between a project team and its stakeholders as well as specification quality of requirements [1], [2]. Requirements engineers need to achieve these objectives to bridge the communication gap between stakeholders and developers [3]. This communication gap is critical since it may lead to unfulfilled customer expectations or communication of incorrect, unclear, ambiguous and non-verifiable requirements [4]. This miscommunication threatens to achieve the software product goal usability [5] consisting of the sub-goals productivity (in terms of efficiency), effectiveness, and satisfaction [1]. Thus, requirements engineering success is important to develop a software with satisfying usability.