Derivation of a Dialog Model from a Task Model by Activity Chain Extraction Kris Luyten 1 , Tim Clerckx 1 , Karin Coninx 1 , and Jean Vanderdonckt 2 c 2003 Springer-Verlag 1 Limburgs Universitair Centrum – Expertise Centre for Digital Media Universitaire Campus, B-3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium {kris.luyten, karin.coninx}@luc.ac.be, tim.clerckx@skynet.be 2 Universit´ e catholique de Louvain – Institut d‘Administration et de Gestion Place des Doyens 1, B-1384 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium vanderdonckt@isys.ucl.ac.be Abstract. Over the last few years, Model-Based User Interface Design has become an important tool for creating multi-device User Interfaces. By providing information about several aspects of the User Interface, such as the task for which it is being built, different User Interfaces can be generated for fulfilling the same needs although they have a differ- ent concrete appearance. In the process of making User Interfaces with a Model-Based Design approach, several models can be used: a task model, a dialog model, a user model, a data model,etc. Intuitively, using more models provides more (detailed) information and will create more appro- priate User Interfaces. Nevertheless, the designer must take care to keep the different models consistent with respect to each other. This paper presents an algorithm to extract the dialog model (partially) from the task model. A task model and dialog model are closely related because the dialog model defines a sequence of user interactions, an activity chain, to reach the goal postulated in the task specification. We formalise the activity chain as a State Transition Network, and in addition this chain can be partially extracted out of the task specification. The designer benefits of this approach since the task and dialog model are consistent. This approach is useful in automatic User Interface generation where several different dialogs are involved: the transitions between dialogs can be handled smoothly without explicitely implementing them. keywords: Model-Based User Interface Design, Task model, Dialog model, Con- curTaskTree, State Transition Networks 1 Introduction The design of User Interfaces (UIs) has changed over the years. Several ap- proaches for designing “good” UIs were developed, in particular Model-Based User Interface (MBUI) design has received a lot of attention. Especially for the