User Interface Design Based on Object-Oriented Analysis: The Process of Designing a Mobile Communication System

The aim of object-oriented analysis methods is to reveal the essential information from the users’ domain of work. This focus is particularly interesting in the design of interactive user interfaces for mobile devices because the severely limited screen space leaves no room for anything else but the most essential information. This paper describes the process of designing the user interface of an interactive location-aware mobile system to support communication in a specific safety-critical application domain. The domain was the fuel department of a coal-based power plant. The process involved ethnographic studies of work activities in the application domain, object-oriented analysis of the problem and application domains, design and implementation of two prototypes, and usability evaluations of each prototype. The description of the process emphasizes the interplay between the object-oriented analysis and the user interface design activities.