Prototyping Digital, Physical, and Mixed User Interfaces by Sketching

Sketching digital and physical user interfaces present many benefits such as naturalness, intuitiveness, ability to elicit user requirements, and ability to discover usability problems. These advantages are confirmed in MIXEDSKETCH, a software for prototyping any type of user interface by sketching: a digital interface such as a graphical user interface, a physical interface such as a tangible user interface,
and, more uniquely, mixed user interfaces that combine elements from both digital and physical worlds, simultaneously or at different design stages. As the development process proceeds from early design to detailed development, MIXEDSKETCH ensures a smooth transition from a lowfidelity representation to a high-level representation of the UI being sketched through mid-fidelity. In the last stage, a precise presentation and a dialog can be sketched that automatically generate a description of the future interface for one or multiple toolkits. In addition, MIXEDSKETCH enables the designer to transform a digital, a physical, or a mixed user interface in a counterpart in another world, e.g. moving from digital to physical to mixed.
Thales Research and Technology France, Paris
Proc. of 1st Int. Workshop on User Interface eXtensible Markup Language UsiXML'2010
2010
27-38