Practical Dialogue Refinement

Researchers have suggested viewing interactive system design as the refinement of an abstract user-task model into an object-oriented interaction model[1, 14]. Inherent in this view is a shift in the nature of the behavior being modeled. We explore the manifestations of such a shift by critically analyzing properties of the forms used to represent task and interaction models. The analysis enabled us to uncover four obstacles to dialogue refinement. We believe that if designers cannot systematically address these obstacles, then the task-model refinement process of development will not be practical on any large scale. We then suggest a refinement framework that systematically deals with these obstacles and demonstrate it on a small, but significant example.