7. Interface design

Although it's not the aim of this dossier to describe all aspects of the user interface, it's clear that the interface of a web application is critical to improving usability. At least three different aspects of user interface design need to be addressed by the designer:

• abstract interface design, which is considered by the OOHDM approach and consists of defining the abstract appearance of each navigation object in terms of composite objects. These composite objects usually reflect the type structure of node attributes. We thus define a set of interface objects that are used to initiate operations (e.g. buttons) and a set of interface objects for anchors. In OOHDM, we use the ADV formalism