Fly: a tool to author planar presentations

Modern presentation software is still built around interaction metaphors adapted from traditional slide projectors. We provide an analysis of the problems in this application genre that presentation authors face and present FLY, a presentation tool that is based on the idea of planar information structures. Inspired by the natural human thought processes of data chunking, association, and spatial memory, FLY explores authoring of presentation documents. Evaluation of a paper prototype showed that the planar UI is easily grasped by users, and leads to presentations more closely resembling the information structure of the original content, thus providing better authoring support than the slide metaphor. Our software prototype confirmed these results, and outperformed PowerPoint in a second study for tasks such as prototyping presentations and generating meaningful overviews. Users reported that this interface helped them better to express their concepts, and expressed significant prefer...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Leonhard Lichtschlag, Thorsten Karrer, Jan O. Borchers
• Keywords: CHI 2009, Human Computer Interaction, Keywords Presentation Software, Modern Presentation Software, Zoomable User Interfaces