What is a UI Only Interaction

In our business documents we use a concept named "transaction" to describe requirements and workflows. A transaction is simply a list of jobs including the roles that perform them and their sequential relationship. Although I am not satisfied with this approach, as it is not a standardized discipline, I worked to improve it, you know when your boss keep talking about some sophisticated ideas for more than a year, you have little choices but to endorse his ideas.

Anyway, I was working to model how we deal with UI in this transactions approach yesterday, I thought it's a good idea to record my work here because I have doubts we ever use my model :-)

In business documents describing transactions we define some UI elements related to transactions. So a transaction, lets call T_k has a collection of e_j^T_k of UI elements associated with. A UI element could be a composition of other UI elements, in my notation: e_j^T_k = {v_i^e_jT_k}. In contrast with e_j^T_k These v_i^e_jT_k are a matter of importance for UI designers.

E_m is a composite UI element:

A transaction (or user interaction) in user perspective changes v_i^e_jT_k to v_i'^e_j'T_k'. The interaction T will be a UI only interaction if and only if j = j' and k = k'. Business documents don't deal with these kinds of interactions because they are not part of a transaction. For example if transaction T requires a pack of data D to be collected in UI, the UI designer has freedom to collect all the D in a single form or a wizard (utilizing multiple UI only interaction). The business document that described T has stated there's a UI element e_j^T that collects D, it does not matter for the business document if e_j^T is a composite element or if the UI designer introduces several UI only interactions.

This is a transaction as is seen in UI:

This is a generalization of the concept: