Model-driven and metrics-driven user experience re-modeling for Rich Internet Applications

Modern web applications (mashups, mobile apps, context-rich web services) offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to model the usability keeping under control the design complexity unleashed by innovative interface and carefully considering the impact of the design decisions on the optimal flow of the user experience. To meet this challenge, we propose a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), and we provide designers with a collection of conceptual model metrics to evaluate alternatives at early stages of the web app lifecycle. We demonstrate through a case study our novel ideas about model metrics and preliminary research results.