Tracing user interface design pre-requirement to generate interface design specification

Requirement traceability has become an important element in the engineering to make development and maintenance work easy. In years, there are many post-requirement traceability techniques and approaches have been proposed that involved forward and backward tracing between design specification and the product development and most of them accompanied by tools. In the preliminary study, the result of the findings shown that the study of pre-requirement tracing and non-functional requirement tracing are still in the beginning. In common practice, designers use low-fidelity prototype to elicit, review and confirm requirements with users. This related techniques involved sketching with pencil and paper, scenario, storyboard, sticky notes or visual design tool. The convenience of using visual tool for user interface development would lead to usability quality ignored and the amount of time devoted to the user interface design has not yet been substantially reduced by the tools. In this paper we propose tracing usability design requirements in the aspect of pre-requirement with the hope to fill the gap between the pre-requirement and post-requirement tracing. The proposal is concerned on the pre-requirement traceability of user interface in generating design specification that explain the rationale of the design based on the source it refers from and the impact of the changes in the confirmed design. With the comprehensive design specification, it is hope that project can be handed-over to different designer easily and provide an audit-trail requirement in the long run.