EPIB
This research is part of a project called Exploratory Programming for Interactive Behaviors (EPIB) that aims to develop natural programming tools for people who don’t have programming background. By interactive behaviors, we mean what an application does as opposed to how it looks. Today, programming is necessary for designing interactive behaviors, and such behaviors are often developed by using scripting tools like Flash or Javascript, or else designers collaborate with programmers who implement the designs in conventional languages like Java or C#. This process poses two major issues, which are:
1. When using scripting tools, the techniques available to designers are too difficult to use and do not adequately support the fundamental needs of designers to explore diverse design ideas freely.
2. When collaborating with programmers, previous surveys show that designers often have communication problems for delivering their idea of some interactive behavior for implementation.
We proposed two workshops to address these two issues of how designers create interactive behaviors and communicate them to co-workers of different profession, in order to investigate the creation of novel user interface building tools focused on helping the design process of creating interactive behaviors.
The first workshop
As part of the research, we conducted the first workshop with 7 professional designers in Pittsburgh. We explored the issue of how to support designers’ idea exploration and development of interactive behavior. The participants were asked to work in 3 different teams, each team with 2~3 members who are from different companies. Three researchers each joined one team to observe, collect information, and ask questions to facilitate their design process. The total duration of the workshop was 3 hours. The workshop was comprised of two major parts. In session 1, each team was assigned with a project that are simple but non-conventional, in order to specify the needs for sketching that are not currently supported by conventional methods. Participants were asked to develop multiple (at least five) design ideas together. The goal of this session was to broadly explore and generate quick design ideas in diversity, rather than developing one idea in a detailed level. At the end of the session, each team were given 10 minutes to present their ideas to other group. In session 2, Participants were asked to develop an imaginary tool that would support the further development of one of the ideas they generated from previous session. However, this session turned out to become more of discussion rather than sketching or designing actual interface. At the end of the session, each team were given 10 minutes to present their ideas to other group, which lead to the whole group discussion.
Following the workshop, we reviewed our notes and watched the videos, looking for points of intersection across the three teams. We identified four main insights:
- Designers conceived of new ideas through explorations of the context, grounded in a specific scenario.
- Designers used body gestures to conceive of and communicate ideas.
- Designers were inspired by examples they recall to motivate new designs.
- Designers started with more conventional designs, move to wildly novel designs, and then moved back to a middle point, in-between novelty and convention.
Second Workshop
The second workshop focused on the activities of refining a novel control and communicating the refined idea to developers. This workshop also took a traditional participatory design approach; we asked participants to design the tools they would use to do the work instead of having them engage in the actual activity of refining a design and communicating a design.Participants included four developers (2 female and 2 male) and four interaction designers (all male) from the local area who all had at least two years of professional experience. None of the participants had taken part in the previous workshop.
The workshop had the following structure:
1. Introduction (10 minutes)
2. Reflection in action: Design a tool for refining a novel control (50 minutes)
3. Design the best form for communicating a designer’s refined design that needs to be implemented by a developer (50 minutes)
4. Reflection on action: Presentation of tools for refinement and communication (5 minutes per team)
Workshop Findings
Following the second workshop, we again reviewed our notes and watched the videos we had taken, looking for points of intersection across the four teams. We identified three main insights from the refinement task:
- There is a need for a tool that can rough out motion using capturing technologies, and that can allow refining properties of the rough motion.
- Examples are used as inspirations and for deriving properties, applying to the interactive behaviors.
- There is a need to support multiple versions to support iterative cycles and creativity.
For the communication, we identified three main insights:
- Participants found static, annotated screens to be inadequate in support of communication and transfer of the design concept.
- Designers and developers had quite differing views of what context would be useful for refinement, context of use or context of design elements in the composition.
- Movies that capture the underlying user scenarios and that also document the dynamic changes in the interface were seen as the most effective technique for communicating a refined design.
