Designing Web-Based Systems in Social Context: A Goal and Scenario Based Approach

In order to design a better web-based system, a designer would like to have notations to visualize how design experts’ knowhow can be applied according to one's specific social and technology situation. We propose the combined use of a goal-oriented language GRL and a scenarios-oriented notation UCM for representing design knowledge of web-based systems and information systems in general. Goals are used to depict business objectives, functional and nonfunctional system requirements. Tasks are used in the exploration of alternative technologies and their operationalizations into system constructs. Actors are used to do role-based analysis on social relationships. Scenarios are used to describe elaborated business processes or workflow. The approach is illustrated with an example of designing a web-based training system.