FreeForm: An informal environment for interface prototyping

Best practice in interface design suggests that hand-drawn sketches are preferable at the early stages of the design process. This paper describes the FreeForm software which supports informal sketched interface design by acting as a Visual Basic Add-In. The Software utilises a digital whiteboard and pen input to support sketching and “running” of an informal prototype

Evaluting a sketch environment for novice programmers

This paper describes the evaluation of an electronic sketch interface design tool for novice programmers. A comparative study was undertaken with small groups using two different shared space environments; a conventional informal design environment and the pen based digital whiteboard. The students reacted positively to the electronic environment, where they worked informally with their design ideas and checked them more carefully

New interaction tools for preserving an old language

The Penan people of Malaysian Borneo were traditionally nomads of the rainforest. They would leave messages in the jungle for each other by shaping natural objects into language tokens and arranging these symbols in specific ways – much like words in a sentence. With settlement, the language is being lost as it is not being used by the younger generation. We report here, a tangible system designed to help the Penans preserve their unique object writing language. The key features of the system are that: the tangibles are made of real objects; it works in the wild; and new tangibles can be fabricated and added to the system by the users. Our evaluations show that the system is engaging and encourages intergenerational knowledge transfer, thus has the potential to help preserve this language

INTERACT 2015 Adjunct Proceedings. 15th IFIP TC.13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 14-18 September 2015, Bamberg, Germany

INTERACT is among the world’s top conferences in Human-Computer Interaction. Starting with the first INTERACT conference in 1990, this conference series has been organised under the aegis of the Technical Committee 13 on Human-Computer Interaction of the UNESCO International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). This committee aims at developing the science and technology of the interaction between humans and computing devices. The 15th IFIP TC.13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT 2015 took place from 14 to 18 September 2015 in Bamberg, Germany. The theme of INTERACT 2015 was "Connection.Tradition.Innovation". This volume presents the Adjunct Proceedings - it contains the position papers for the students of the Doctoral Consortium as well as the position papers of the participants of the various workshops

Special Issue on Diagram Aesthetics and Layout

Edited journal special issue

Recognizing Sketches of Euler Diagrams Drawn with Ellipses

Euler diagrams form the basis of a number of visual languages. However, the existing tool support for creating Euler diagrams is limited to generic diagram editing software that uses mouse and keyboard interfaces. A more natural and convenient mode of entry is via a sketching interface. In addition, it is known that sketching, as opposed to using an editing package, facilitates greater cognitive focus on the task of diagram creation. This paper presents the first sketch tool for Euler diagrams. In particular, we describe the recognition mechanism and conversion that takes a sketched Euler diagram and converts it into a formal diagram drawn with ellipses and circles. The semantics of the sketch is computed