Interactive prototyping of tabletop and surface applications
Tulio de Souza Alcantara, Jennifer Ferreira, Frank Maurer · 2013
Physically large touch-based devices, such as tabletops, afford numerous innovative interaction possibilities; however, for application development on these devices to be successful, users must be presented with interactions they find natural and easy to learn. User-centered design advocates the use of prototyping to help designers create software that is a better fit with user needs and yet, due to time pressures or inappropriate tool support, prototyping may be considered too costly to do. To address these concerns, we designed ProtoActive, a tool for designing and evaluating multi-touch applications on large surfaces via sketch-based prototypes. Our tool allows designers to define custom gestures and evaluate them without requiring any programming knowledge. The paper presents the results of pilot studies as well as in-the-wild usage of the tool.