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CrossWeaverInformally Prototyping Cross-device, Multimodal User Interfaces
Increasingly, it is important to look at the end-user’s tool of the future as not a solitary PC, but as a diverse set of devices, ranging from laptops to PDA's to tablet computers. Some of these devices do not have keyboard and mouse, and thus multimodal interaction techniques, such as pen input and speech input, will be required to interface with them. Interaction designers are increasingly faced with the challenge of creating interfaces that target this style of interface. Our study into their interface design practice uncovered the lack of processes and tools to help them. This project covers the motivation, design, and development of CrossWeaver, a tool for helping these designers prototype multimodal, multidevice user interfaces. This tool embodies the informal prototyping paradigm, leaving design representations in an informal, sketched form and creating a working prototype from these sketches. Informal prototypes created with CrossWeaver can run across multiple standalone devices simultaneously, processing multimodal input from each one. CrossWeaver captures all of the user interaction when running a test of a prototype. This input log can quickly be viewed for the details of the users’ multimodal interaction, and it can be replayed across all participating devices, giving the designer information to help him or her iterate the interface design.
Contact Information
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9985111. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF). |
