CTTE: ConcurTaskTrees Environment

Mori G., Paternò F., Santoro C.

task models  tools for hci  models for hci  interactive systems 

CTTE provides developers with ways to represent task -related information, including attributes, objects manipulated and temporal relationships, to easily create, analyse and modify the activities that users should perform through an interactive system. CTTE is particularly oriented to support the design phase since it allows users to specify how the different activities should be structured and dynamically evolve, providing a large number of possibilities for supporting easy development and analysis of task models, the richest currently available. The tool leverages ConcurTaskTrees, a notation allowing users to represent task models in a hierarchical way, also providing a rich set of temporal operators able to describe flexible behaviours of both individual and multi-user activities. The task model's structure can be easily modified with the support of an interactive simulator that allows designers to explore and better understand the dynamic evolution of the model specified. Moreover, different views of the task model (complete view, summary view, view by levels, folding and unfolding of subtrees, etc.) are made available in the tool, which supports model-specification at various refinement levels. Additional features are also provided. Among these we mention the possibility to check the completeness of the specification, to have the task information saved in different formats, to compare models and to automatically expand task patterns.