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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.

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.