HCC: Small: Better Tools for Authoring Interactive Behaviors

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Web pages and most other things created for computers are interactive, in that they respond to what people do with them. They have animations, buttons that cause information to change, and game characters that move around under a person's control. Creating these "interactive behaviors" has usually required writing programs, usually in a conventional programming language such as C++, JavaScript, or Adobe's Flash. However, this is a barrier to the vast majority of people who do not know how to program. In particular, there is a large class of people, often called "interaction designers", who are trained in how to make more aesthetic and usable interactive behaviors, but who are not professional programmers, and therefore cannot create these parts by themselves. Research shows that they do identify programming as the main barrier to creating and improving interactive behaviors. One reason that it is important that interaction designers be able to create the behaviors themselves is because by quickly creating, trying out and modifying the behaviors, they are able to creatively explore and develop new and better designs. The ultimate goal of this research is to provide a new tool that enables interaction designers and other non-professional programmers to create systems with interactive behaviors in a more natural way. To achieve this, investigators will first study how designers and other people think about interactive behaviors. This will provide insight about how such behaviors can be expressed more "naturally", which means how a person can instruct a computer in a way that is close to the way the person is thinking about the desired result. Preliminary studies show that designers do not think about behaviors in the same way as professional programmers. Next, the investigators will use this knowledge about the natural expressions to create a new authoring tool which will make it much easier for designers to create their own interactive behaviors. The initial design for the tool uses techniques that are familiar to designers, such as the drawing model of programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft PowerPoint, the computation style of spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel, and the event-based style (such as: "when a bullet intersects a spaceship, then the spaceship should start the blowing-up animation"), which has been found to be a natural way to express these behaviors. The result will be new knowledge and tools that will make programming more accessible to more people, and thus broaden the range of people who can program, while specifically enabling interaction designers to create their own behaviors.