User Interface Transition Diagrams for customer-developer communication improvement in software development projects

We formalize the definition and construction of the User Interface Transition Diagram (UITD) which is a modelling notation for the transitions between UI presentations and the necessary conditions to trigger these transitions. We show how the UITD is able to improve the communication between stakeholders in a software development project: Human-Computer Interaction specialists, Software Engineers and customers who have little or no training in specialized modelling notations. We compare the UITD with other existing similar modelling notations highlighting the features that are better expressed in the UITD. We also include a case study in order to show how the UITD can be helpful in different phases of a software development project. The understandability of the UITD was confirmed by means of a test where different types of potential users were involved. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.