To create an innovative interactive multimedia application, a multimedia designer needs to rapidly explore numerous behavioral design ideas early in the design process, as creating innovative behavior is the cornerstone of creating innovative multimedia. Current tools and techniques do not support a designer’s need for early behavior exploration, limiting her ability to rapidly explore and effectively communicate behavioral design ideas. To address this need, we have developed a sketch-based, interactive multimedia storyboard tool that uses a designer’s ink strokes and textual annotations as an input design vocabulary. By operationalizing this vocabulary, the tool transforms an otherwise static sketch into a working example. The behavioral sketch can be quickly edited using gestures and an expressive visual language. By enabling a designer to explore and communicate behavioral design ideas using working examples early in the design process, our tool facilitates the creation of a more effective, compelling, and entertaining multimedia application.

Draft of invited article submitted to the Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, John Wiley & Sons, 2000. This draft must not be re-printed or distributed.

Abstract not found

Paper prototyping is often used during the critical stage of early design. While paper prototyping requires a small time investment, it can fail to accurately convey the application’s behavior. Existing computerized tools allow designers to express both appearance and interactions through sketching; designers may even execute their sketches. However, these tools have limitations, such as scalability and an inability to represent some complex behaviors. By asking users to sketch interfaces that are complex and novel, we developed a family of sketching taxonomies. We also created a set of suggested design notations based on the specific behaviors and characteristics users sketched. Furthermore, we developed an iterative user-centric approach that can be used to expand and refine the SNARF taxonomies and suggested notations. Most users, given these suggested notations were able to double their sketched behavior. This result suggests our notations would be a welcome addition to any sketch-based tool. We also identified the potential of color as a linking mechanism.