informal

In our previous studies into web design, we found that pens, paper, walls, and tables were often used for explaining, developing, and communicating ideas during the early phases of design. These wall-scale paper-based design practices inspired The Designers' Outpost, a tangible user interface that combines the affordances of paper and large physical workspaces with the advantages of electronic media to support information design. With Outpost, users collaboratively author web site information architectures on an electronic whiteboard using physical media (Post-it notes and images), structuring and annotating that information with electronic pens. This interaction is enabled by a touch-sensitive SMART Board augmented with a robust computer vision system, employing a rear-mounted video camera for capturing movement and a front-mounted high-resolution camera for capturing ink. We conducted a participatory design study with fifteen professional web designers. The study validated that Outpost supports information architecture work practice, and led to our adding support for fluid transitions to other tools.

SketchWizard allows designers to create Wizard of Oz prototypes of pen-based user interfaces in the early stages of design. In the past, designers have been inhibited from participating in the design of pen-based interfaces because of the inadequacy of paper prototypes and the difficulty of developing functional prototypes. In SketchWizard, designers and end users share a drawing canvas between two computers, allowing the designer to simulate the behavior of recognition or other technologies. Special editing features are provided to help designers respond quickly to end-user input. This paper describes the SketchWizard system and presents two evaluations of our approach. The first is an early feasibility study in which Wizard of Oz was used to prototype a pen-based user interface. The second is a laboratory study in which designers used SketchWizard to simulate existing pen-based interfaces. Both showed that end users gave valuable feedback in spite of delays between end-user actions and wizard updates.

Informal prototyping tools have shown great potential in facilitating the early stage design of user interfaces. How-ever, continuous interactions, an important constituent of highly interactive interfaces, have not been well supported by previous tools. These interactions give continuous visual feedback, such as geometric changes of a graphical object, in response to continuous user input, such as the movement of a mouse. We built Monet, a sketch-based tool for proto-typing continuous interactions by demonstration. In Monet, designers can prototype continuous widgets and their states of interest using examples. They can also demonstrate com-pound behaviors involving multiple widgets by direct ma-nipulation. Monet allows continuous interactions to be eas-ily integrated with event-based, discrete interactions. Con-tinuous widgets can be embedded into storyboards and their states can condition or trigger storyboard transitions. Monet achieves these features by employing continuous function approximation and statistical classification techniques, without using any domain specific knowledge or assuming any application semantics. Informal feedback showed that Monet is a promising approach to enabling more complete tool support for early stage UI design.

Location-enhanced applications use the location of people, places, and things to augment or streamline interaction. Location-enhanced applications are just starting to emerge in several different domains, and many people believe that this type of application will experience tremendous growth in the near future. However, it currently requires a high level of technical expertise to build location-enhanced applications, making it hard to iterate on designs. To address this problem we introduce Topiary, a tool for rapidly prototyping location-enhanced applications. Topiary lets designers create a map that models the location of people, places, and things; use this active map to demonstrate scenarios depicting location contexts; use these scenarios in creating storyboards that describe interaction sequences; and then run these storyboards on mobile devices, with a wizard updating the location of people and things on a separate device. We performed an informal evaluation with seven researchers and interface designers and found that they reacted positively to the concept.