A reader of this blog has just posted a comment on one of my previous entries on the Inspector tool.

The tool´s website is http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/inspector. Both the theoretical and practical approach is published in my thesis (http://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/volltexte/2009/7992/).

The according software project is continued at http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/BlendedIxD with focus on collaboration, support and simulation.

While research is dealing with new visions for blended development techniques, the basic idea of collaborative and interdisciplinary user interface specification must still find its ways into practice. Corporate developers and project managers hanker for appropriate means of joint modeling and prototyping. Some commercial tools (iRise, Axure, Microsoft Expression Blend) already pave the way for sophisticated, but easy to use methods applicable in what I call "visual requirements engineering".

Usability engineers and business analysts need a framework that supports them in travelling from analysis models to the visually specified design of the user interface.

With UI specifications that substitute ambiguous textual specifications with graphical representations of the desired UI and diagrammatic models describing user tasks and behavior, the work of usability professionals will become more engineering-driven and probably more accredited by software developers and formalists.