Generalizing interface design knowledge: lessons learned from developing a claims library

The experience of preparing interface design knowledge to be reusable allows reflection on the process, potential and general challenges of effectively and efficiently using this knowledge in design tasks. With an interest in crafting a catalog for design claims that would implement recent reuse theory in the human-computer interaction field, we developed and implemented a unique process of creating reusable content for notification systems - interfaces used for multitasking. This process, which we describe and illustrate, extends previous work on capturing metadata related to design claims. The data and metadata are stored in the catalog, which is intended to be accessible to other designers for reuse in other domains. The multitask nature of our catalog subject matter highlights a major challenges faced in reuse: the generalization specific and contextual information (claims). The challenge of balancing abstraction with specificity to ensure both meaningful and domain-independent data is also addressed. We believe that our approach can generalize to other reuse projects that strive for cross-domain knowledge application.