MoLIC Designer: Towards Computational 
Support to HCI Design with MoLIC
Ugo B. Sangiorgi, Simone D.J. Barbosa
SERG, Departamento de Informática, PUC­Rio. Rua Marquês de São Vicente, 225.
MoLIC, the "Modeling Language for Interaction as Conversation" [5, 6] was
created for designing interaction as user-designer conversations, It is based
on Semiotic Engineering [2] and provides a blueprint for the conceptual
interactive solution for an application, representing its apparent behavior as
it is to be communicated by the designer and experienced by the users.
With MoLIC Designer, we want to address some questions regarding the
use of MoLIC when designing interactive applications, while it might serve to
raise the critical mass on Semiotic Engineering among HCI practitioners and
researchers. It is composed of a graphical diagram editor, with syntactic
verification based on the MoLIC language. It also allows designers to bind
goals with interaction sequences and helps to compare different design
solutions.
Design Modeling
HCI design has traditionally embraced informal approaches such as
storyboards, scenarios, and sketches (e.g. [1]). Given that they are easily
understood by users and other stakeholders, they are used in various stages
of design. However, as they need to be informal, they lack precision and are
often ambiguous.
Research on HCI has also proposed more formal approaches to design (e.g.
[3, 4, 7]), using models not only to conceive the user-system interaction
design, but also to automatically generate the concrete user interface by
adopting a model-driven approach to HCI design and development.
MoLIC’s Interaction Diagram
A MoLIC interaction diagram basically depicts the turn taking between the
user and the designer's deputy in the user interface, forming conversation
threads, with structures of topics and subtopics. Just as misunderstandings
are common in human communication, MoLIC encourages designers to
carefully anticipate conversation breakdowns (i.e., mismatches between a
user's expressed intentions and the system behavior) and design
conversations that will allow users to recover from them.
The diagram does not include user interface details; the focus is on the
interaction. Having decided on the interactive solution, the concrete user
interface may be elaborated according to other techniques and
representations, such as sketching, storyboarding, and prototyping. The
figure below shows a basic MoLIC diagram for a simple operation of
publishing a news item on a hypothetical news system.
{usangiorgi,simone}@inf.puc­rio.br
 
Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil, 22451­900
The MoLIC elements depicted in the figure are the following:
a. ubiquitous access: an opportunity for the user to change the subject of
the conversation, from any other scene on the application, typically to achieve
a different goal than the current one.
b. user utterance: a user’s utterance to proceed to a certain topic in the
conversation, formatted as u:content.
c. scene: a moment in the interaction in which it is mainly the user’s turn to
decide on how the conversation should proceed. It contains the conversation
topic and the dialogues that make up the conversation subtopics and focus.
The scene topic may be viewed as the designer saying to the user: "At this
moment, you may *topic*".
d. system process: the system's internal processing, which takes place away
from the users' perception.
e. designer utterance: the designer's turn to decide the next conversation
topic, typically in response of a user request. In the figure, letter “e” indicates
a breakdown recovery utterance, through a dashed line.
f. closing point: the end of the conversation (i.e., exit from the system).
MoLIC Designer is a tool for the designer to model the user-deputy dialogues
using MoLIC. Given that nowadays there is relatively little critical mass on
Semiotic Engineering and on MoLIC itself, we expect the tool will help in that
direction by facilitating diagram modeling for both practitioners and
researchers. Anchored in Semiotic Engineering, MoLIC Designer should help
designers explore and learn more about what and how communication is
currently being designed.
We are currently working on prototype transformation modules to process
the MoLIC's meta-model and allow the generation of other representations,
such as scenarios, task models, UML diagrams, and user interface models.
The main concern now, however, is to keep as primary the epistemic goal in
supporting interaction design.
References
[1]  Buxton, B.. 2007. Sketching user experiences: Getting the design right and the right design. Morgan Kaufmann.
[2]  de Souza, C.  S. 2005. The semiotic engineering of human­computer interaction. The MIT Press. 
[3]  Diaper,  D.,  &  Stanton,  N.  2003.  The  handbook  of  task  analysis  for  human­computer  interaction.  Lawrence   
Erlbaum Associates Inc,US. 
[4]  Paternò, F. 2000. Model­based Design of Interactive Applications. Intelligence. 11(4), 26–38. 
[5]  Paula,  M.  G.  2003.  Projeto  da  Interação  Humano­Computador  Baseado  em  Modelos  Fundamentados  na 
Engenharia Semiótica: Construção de um modelo de interação. Msc dissertation, Departamento de Informática.
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.
[6]  Silva,  B.  S.  2005.  MoLIC  segunda  edição:  revisão  de  uma  linguagem  para  modelagem  da  interação  humano­
computador. MSc dissertation, Departamento de Informática. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.
[7]  Vanderdonckt,  J.,  &  Berquin,  P.  1999.  Towards  a  very  large  model­based  approach  for  user  interface   
development.  International workshop on User interfaces to data intensive systems.