Studies of Designers

(Note: This part of the research was originally called "Euclase", since it was part of the early motivation for Euclase, but now Euclase refers to the interactive tool that helps designers author behaviors.)

Interaction designers are the next generation of design professionals, who not only explore visual designs for interactive systems, but also the interactive details. They may design web sites, museum kiosks, mobile phone applications, games and other types of interactive content.

This project is exploring who interaction designers are, what types of work they do, and how they think about and express ideas about interactivity. The ultimate goal is to design new programming languages and environments that are more suitable for this kind of design work than any of today's interactive prototyping tools like Adobe Flash or Visual Basic.

In addition to deploying a survey about interaction designers' work and experience, we have also run a lab study to explore interaction designers' descriptions of simple interactive behaviors. For example, in the figure below, a participant viewed a movie portraying changes to the positions of the five circles and was asked to explain the correspondence between the circles and the value in the text box.

Questions like these help elicit designers' descriptions of constraint relationships. We're using the results of these kinds of studies to inform the design of a new prototyping language.

(Euclase stands for: End User Centered Language, APIs, System, and Environment.)

 

Myers, B., Park, S., Nakano, Y., Mueller, G., Ko, A. (2008). How Designers Design and Program Interactive Behaviors. IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, VL/HCC'08. Sept 15-19, 2008, Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany. pp. 177-184.

Park, S., Myers, B., Ko, A. (2008). Designers' Natural Descriptions of Interactive Behaviors. IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, VL/HCC'08. Sept 15-19, 2008, Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany. pp. 185-188.

Oney, S., B. Myers, and J. Zimmerman, Visions for Euclase: Ideas for Supporting Creativity through Better Prototyping of Behaviors. ACM CHI 2009 Workshop on Computational Creativity. To appear