Specification Methods of Multimodal Interactive Systems

A Specification Method provides interface designers a model or notation to describe and record their design philosophy to facilitate evaluations as early as possible in pursuit of an optimum interface option. A number of formal notations have been developed to assist the description or analysis of interactive systems. This paper first simply reviews a subset of these notations from the perspective of system and user respectively, then detailedly illustrates two notations commonly used to specify multimodal interactive systems. On the basis of comparison and evaluation of such various approaches, also combined with particular characteristics inherent in multimodal interaction, I put forward a hierarchical multimodal interface specification(HMIS) applicable to multimodal description. The paper concludes by presenting an example specified with HMIS.