Assessing the User Experience: Setting and

In order to assess the design of the user interface, as well as to gather more insights about the requirements for the design of such an appliance, the experience prototype of the EnlighTable was tested in the lab. As already anticipated, due to the novelty of the technology as well as the size of the physical table it relies on, it was not possible to test it in the field, i.e., in the context of creative agencies. To the end of coping with such limitations, while still gathering an understanding of how such an appliance could enter the design practice, potential target users (i.e., people working in creative agencies) were invited to test the appliance.

The user interface of the prototype was realized in Flash, and run on the interactive table of the FLUIDUM instrumented room. Such a table consists of an LCD monitor with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, embedded into a wooden table and equipped with a DViT2 overlay panel for interactivity. Hence, the team members share an overall table space of 1.6 x 1.2 meters.

Whilst this simulation set-up didn’t provide the full multi-handed input intended in the design, nor a contextualized evaluation in the field, it still supported a preliminary exploration and the sharing of design ideas with potential users. Thus, a qualitative approach was adopted and 7 in-depth in- terviews were conducted with participants who covered different roles within creative team-work: two managers of creative agencies, two creative direc- tors, a free lancer working on conceptual design for adverting agencies, a graphic designer, and a professor of art education. The size of the agencies

6 Design of Hybrid Environments for Collaborative Creativity

the participants worked for was heterogeneous (up to 20 people), as well as the focus of the agencies (print as well as web communication).

Every interview lasted about one and a half hour and followed a pre- defined format. Each interviewee was first asked some questions concerning the specific workflow of her/his creative team: e.g., how many people usu- ally work on a project, their roles and professions, how activities of picture selection take place, what activities are worked out in co-location, etc. (see Appendix B). The participant was then introduced to the vision of ubiquitous displays and novel collaborative scenarios. In this context a video was shown, which illustrates how the EnLighTable works. Afterwards, the participant was led to the instrumented room of our lab (cf. Chapter 1, Section 1.2) and the EnLighTable appliance was presented. In this phase, the participant was first given a short demonstration of how to use the different functionalities, and then s/he was invited to play around with it. The interviewee was then engaged in a discussion about the interface (e.g., what s/he found easy or less easy to understand and use in the prototype); as well as about the potential use and impact of such an appliance in her/his creative team-work.

Even though the number of testers is too limited to make generalizations, those interviews provided some useful insights about the design of the user interface, and about further requirements for such a kind of appliance.

Considering the pragmatic level of the interface, the participants men- tioned that they found very intuitive to use the graphic gear for continuous zooming and enjoyed the feeling of “directly touching and directly working on the photo”, using their fingers and the stylus to do so. In this respect, they mentioned it was a more immediate interaction with the media than the one afforded by a transducer such as the mouse. Despite recognizing the lim- itations of the technology (which supports single input only), they seemed to understand right away that the design was intended for two-handed interac- tion, and they actually used both the non-dominant as well as the dominant hands to interact, alternatively. Furthermore, 6 of them expressed the wish of using the pen with more freedom and in a more analogue way in the in- terface. Indeed, the interface was designed in such a way that a tapping and dragging action with the pen-tip (i.e., a diagonal stroke) would draw a frame for drafting a layout on the blank area of the table (similar to the interaction necessary for drawing a rectangle in most drawing applications, see Fig. 6.3, b). Those participants mentioned that they would have liked to use the pen for sketching and annotating as well. This, in terms of design, would imply the distinction between two modes to recognize the way in which the pen is used (i.e., similar to an analogue pen or to a mouse); or to create a gesture vocabulary for the creation of rectangles similar to the one implemented in the Brainstorm appliance (see Section 6.3.2 and Fig. 6.5, a, in this chap-

6.2. The EnLighTable

ter). This dichotomy between analogue and mouse-like use of the pen as transducer is further discussed in Section 6.4.

Additionally, the interviews provided a deeper understanding of how such an appliance might enter actual collaborative design practices, and how its use can be affected by existing social and professional contexts. The possi- bility to simultaneously view multiple pictures on a table and to easily drag them within the focus of attention and visual angle of team members - so as to discuss them together with colleagues - was highly appreciated by each interviewee. For participants representing print agencies, the resolution of the display and the possibility to visualize photos in a 1:1 scale was very important. The interaction technique, which as already said allows direct manipulation without a mouse, was positively assessed by all participants: Some of them also mentioned that such an interaction could make the pro- cess of image selection and simple editing more accessible to everyone in the creative team, and potentially to clients as well, thus having clients’ feed- back earlier in the design process. Such a broader collaboration, though, was not recognized as necessary or desirable by every participant. In particular, the ones representing web agencies mentioned that the selection of photos in this kind of business is often managed by a single graphic designer, who sometimes directly interacts with the client: This fact implies minor commu- nication flows and iterative meetings within the agency. Furthermore, in the field of web communication, ad-hoc photographic shooting is quite rare, and mostly digital libraries are consulted, so that collaborative selection might result unlikely. In these cases, the need and/or benefits of such an appli- ance for collaborative design were less evident. In other words, the different media of design (i.e., print vs. web communication) seem to imply different workflows and hierarchical structures, at least amongst the agencies repre- sented by the participants. This fact, in turn, seems to affect the creative decision process, and it would potentially determine different uses/users of an appliance such as the EnLighTable in different organizations.

In summary, the assessment of the experience prototype in collaboration with the target users was informative on two different aspects mainly:

• in terms of current design practices: The inquiry sheds some light on how the target media (i.e., paper vs. digital communication products) affect the functional requirements for such a kind of appliance, as well as organizational and collaborative patterns of the creative team-work;

• in terms of the user interface at the pragmatic level: The inquiry sug- gests that novel interaction techniques may affect aspects of collabora- tive work by including different stakeholders at an early stage of the

6 Design of Hybrid Environments for Collaborative Creativity

project (e.g., clients) thanks to the way in which the media can be visualized and manipulated. Furthermore, it suggests how the use of a certain tool, i.e. the pen, seems to create diverse expectations for the way in which it can be used in a hybrid setting of interaction (e.g., as an analogue vs. a mouse-like tool).

Building on these insights, the inquiry extended from the table to a multi- display environment. The goal was to further investigate how the embedding of computing capabilities into the surfaces of a physical space can support collaborative creative processes and how. The possibility of connecting mul- tiple displays in the environment, indeed, provides additional opportunities for externalization and spatial mapping of information/ideas, which is fun- damental in creative processes. Hence, in the next section the design focus moves from the table as confined interactive surface, towards a multi-display set-up as socio-technical ecosystem, and explores how the combination of the different qualities of large interactive surfaces with different orientations can support the generation, externalization, shareability, and elaboration of ideas. In this way, the physical and social affordances of different surfaces are considered in relation to each-other, and cognitive affordances are de- signed for enhancing communication and creativity, striving for a high level of shareability (cf. Section 6.1).