How designers design and program interactive behaviors

Designers are skilled at sketching and prototyping the look of interfaces, but to explore various behaviors (what the interface does in response to input) typically requires programming using Javascript, ActionScript for Flash, or other languages. In our survey of 259 designers, 86% reported that the behavior is more difficult to prototype than the appearance. Often (78% of the time), designing the behavior requires collaborating with developers, but 76% of designers reported that communicating the behavior to developers was more difficult than the appearance. Other results include that annotations such as arrows and paragraphs of text are used on top of sketches and storyboards to explain behaviors, and designers want to explore multiple versions of behaviors, but today’s tools make this difficult. The results provide new ideas for future tools.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: VL
• Authors: Brad A. Myers, Sun Young Park, Yoko Nakano, Greg Mueller, Andrew Jensen Ko
• Keywords: Behavior, Designers, Languages, Various Behaviors, VL 2008