Towards the automatic specification of the behaviour of early prototypes using Lean Cuisine+

The focus of the paper is on support for the early prototyping of interactive systems, that is, on support for the initial design phase. A shortcoming of current early prototyping tools is that although they permit the designer to construct a mock-up of the look and feel of the user interface, they provide no model of the interaction. Early prototyping tools could be extended to produce such a model as a byproduct of the construction of the prototype. The paper describes such an extension to HyperCard, and reviews its utility. The interaction model is specified in Lean Cuisine+, a semi-formal graphical notation for describing the behaviour of direct manipulation graphical user interfaces. The model produced provides additional information on the interaction, is useful as documentation, and can be analysed for structural shortcomings. This type of extension is not limited to early prototyping tools, and could be applied to other classes of development tools for interactive systems.