Design as exploration

Björn Hartmann, Loren Yu, Abel Allison, Yeonsoo Yang, Scott R. Klemmer
2008 Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology - UIST '08  
Creating multiple prototypes facilitates comparative reasoning, grounds team discussion, and enables situated exploration. However, current interface design tools focus on creating single artifacts. This paper introduces the Juxtapose code editor and runtime environment for designing multiple alternatives of both application logic and interface parameters. For rapidly comparing code alternatives, Juxtapose introduces selectively parallel source editing and execution. To explore parameter
more » ... ons, Juxtapose automatically creates control interfaces for "tuning" application variables at runtime. This paper describes techniques to support design exploration for desktop, mobile, and physical interfaces, and situates this work in a larger design space of tools for explorative programming. A summative study of Juxtapose with 18 participants demonstrated that parallel editing and execution are accessible to interaction designers and that designers can leverage these techniques to survey more options, faster. Figure 1. Interaction designers explore options in Juxtapose through a source code editor that supports alternative code documents (left), a runtime interface that offers parallel execution and tuning of application parameters (center), and an external controller for spatially-multiplexed input (right). 91
doi:10.1145/1449715.1449732 dblp:conf/uist/HartmannYAYK08 fatcat:grsqzob7cvdqtd4jpzrvfbf2fe