Designers’ natural descriptions of interactive behaviors

While a designer's focus used to be the design of non-interactive elements such as graphics or animations, today's designers deal with various levels of interactivity such as mouse, keyboard and touch screen interaction. Unfortunately, it is challenging for designers to create these diverse interactions since most implementation tools such as Flash require the use of conventional programming languages and do not support the natural expressions used by designers. To better understand how designers think about interactive behaviors, we conducted a lab study where designers and programmers described various primitive and composite interactive behaviors using their own language. From this, we learned that there is significant commonality among designers in terms of the verbs, syntax, and structure when describing interactivity. These results can help guide the way to building more natural programming languages and environments for designers to facilitate the development of interactive behaviors.

1. Introduction

Most of the interactivity designed by interaction designers involves pointer input, graphical objects, and relationships between these over time [3]. Unfortunately, current commercial tools for interactive behaviors seem to be focused on two approaches: either the designer is given a very limited selection of behaviors to select from a menu (such as the roll-overs and page transitions in Dreamweaver), or else the designer is assumed to only work on the appearance, with the behavior being created by a programmer using a conventional programming language (this is the apparent workflow of Microsoft's Expression Blend). Unfortunately, it is challenging for designers to explore the diverse interactive behaviors that they want using either of these approaches.