Deriving Presentations from Task Models Fabio Paterno (*), Ilse Breedvelt-Schouten (+) & Nicole de Koning (+) (*)CNUCE-C.N.R., Via S.Maria 36,56126 Pisa, Italy, tpatemo@clluce.('/ll'.it (+)BAAN Labs, BAAN Company N. V., P.O. Box 250,6710 BG, Ede, The Netherlands, {ibreedvelt, Ildkonillgl@baan.nl Abstract: Most task-based approaches have been used to analyse and design the dialogue part of interactive applications. There has been less focus on how a task model can be used to derive systematically indications for the design of the presentation of a user interface. This paper presents a solution to this problem which is based on identifying the sets of tasks that are active during the same period of time, and rules that take into account the semantics of the tasks considered and their relationships. Key words: Task models, Design of presentations, Systematic methods for supporting design and development 1. INTRODUCTION The design of the presentation of modern interactive user interfaces is often complex and requires in-depth design knowledge. It is thus important to identify declarative models and inference mechanisms that significantly reduce the demands on the interface developer. Many aspects of design knowledge are domain- independent so that it only needs to be stated once and then can be applied to many different domains. Task models (Diaper, 1989) have been recognised as an important element in user interface design (Johnson et aI., 1993) as they incorporate knowledge of the user's intentions and activities. However most of the work on task-based design has focused on how to support the design of the structure of the dialogue. Less attention The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35349-4_22 © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 1999 S. Chatty et al. (eds.), Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction