An increasing recognition of the role of the human-system interface is leading to new extensions and styles of specification. Techniques are being developed that facilitate the expression of user-oriented requirements and the refinement and checking of specifications of interactive systems. This book reflects the state of the art in this important area and also contains a summary of working group discussions about how the various techniques represented might be applied to a common case study.

Do interactive systems need specifications?.- PAC-ing the architecture of your user interface.- DMVIS: Design, modelling and validation of interactive systems.- Users as rational interacting agents: Formalising assumptions about cognition and interaction.- Establishing a link between usability and utility: Validation of task-based dialogue using a semantic prototype.- Evaluating narrative in multimedia.- Interactors and Haggis: Executable specifications for interactive systems.- Formally verifying interactive systems: A review.- Investigating the behaviour of PREMO synchronizable objects.- Formal transducers: Models of devices and building bricks for the design of highly interactive systems.- From text to Petri nets: The difficulties of describing accident scenarios formally.- Unifying toolkit programming layers: A multi-purpose toolkit integration module.- Editing MAD* task descriptions for specifying user interfaces, at both semantic and presentation levels.- Formal aspects of task based design.- Reusable structures in task models.- The interaction specification workspace: Specifying and designing the interaction issues of virtual reality training environments from within.- The notion of trajectory in graphical user interfaces.- A representational approach to the specification of presentations.- On biasing behaviour to the optimal.- Modelling in Action. Reports from the DSVIS'97 working groups.