Reading #12: D-Macs: Building Multi-Device User Interfaces by Demonstrating, Sharing and Replaying Design Actions

Comments

Shena Hoffman

Steven Hennessy

Reference

D-Macs: Building Multi-Device User Interfaces by Demonstrating, Sharing and Replaying Design Actions

Jan Meskens, Kris Luyten, Karin Coninx

UIST 2010 - New York

Summary

This paper introduces D-Macs, a tool for designing interfaces across multiple devices. There is an increasing need in today’s growing technological device space for an easy solution to designing applications for multiple devices. This is easily seen with examples like YouTube, which has applications on major mobile platforms in addition to their web interface. D-Macs aims to allow designers to create designs for multiple devices in an easy way. They are able to see their designs for multiple devices in one easy to use GUI interface. Additionally, their design decisions are recorded and can be played back or shared with other designers. It does not require a high amount of learning and does not rely on artificial intelligence algorithms for automatically creating new designs for other systems.

Discussion

This paper addresses a definite problem in our community: designing the same application for multiple devices. I found that the paper’s solution, while nice and probably helpful to a large number of designers, was somewhat less capable of solving the problem it presented than other systems. Initially, I believed the system to be able to take one design and create for other systems. Instead, it appears that the designer must still specify for other systems as well as the primary, just with the assistance of recorded actions. It might be nice to have a mix of this kind of system and a system which relies on artificial intelligence techniques to create a new environment.