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VBoard

Students: Nick Mangano, UC Irvine/ISR, Alex Baker, UC Irvine/ISR

 

Advisor: André van der Hoek, UC Irvine/ISR


Abstract: Sketching is a common technique employed by software designers in the initial stages of design; however, designers today prefer the primitive yet effective white board approach over digital alternatives, which they feel are cumbersome for the creative process. Previous tools such as DENIM, SILK, Knight, and SUMLOW attempted to interpret the actions by the user; however, literature and experience have demonstrated that the slightest defect in interpretation is damaging to the creative process. Taking user experience with these previous tools in mind, the VBoard project was approached with the mindset that a design exploration tool must allow the designer to enter a creative flow. VBoard uses the metaphor of scraps of paper connected with yarn to drive user interaction. The user is given tools that build around the intuitive experience, such as on screen buckets that allow the user to save various states "on the go," as well as a list of concerns they can use to annotate the diagrams. VBoard aims to create the optimum "flow" experience in creative design that is not possible with current development tools. VBoard remains in development; however, experiments are soon planned to determine the extent to which this tool may increase creativity over a white board alone.


Bio:

Alex Baker received his B.S. and M.S in Information and Computer Science from the University of California Irvine. He is currently working towards a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science, researching the role of design in software development. He previously developed Problems and Programmers, an educational software engineering card game.


Nicolas Mangano is currently a senior undergraduate Information and Computer Science as well as Psychology Bachelors student and future Ph. D. student at the University of California, Irvine. He has been working under the guidance of Alex Baker and André van der Hoek for the past six months on VBoard.