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

Comments
Derek Landini
Stephen Morrow 

Reference Information

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

Authors: Jan Meskens, Kris Luyten, Karin Coninx

Where/When: UIST 2010, New York, New York

Summary
This paper discusses Design tool Macros (D-Macs), a multi-device GUI builder that allows design actions to be recorded across devices, shared with other designers, and replayed in order to reuse them across multiple platforms. This came about from an increasing need for application deployment across multiple devices, such as both computers and phones. Manually designing a user interface for each device takes time, and many actions are repeated across each device. Therefore, D-Macs automates multi-device UI design by capturing and reusing design actions across devices.

One of the key points of D-Macs is that it does not require designers to master a new programming language in order to specify device designs. Instead, designers can work on the actual visual design for every platform. In addition, D-Macs records design sequences to automate later, instead of relying on unpredictable artificial intelligence algorithms to predict design sequences. Feedback is largely emphasized, providing a graphic history of past user actions and letting the user know when a sequence has been automated and why. The system provides contextual assistance by only applying actions to those devices that are applicable for that particular action.

Actions include direct manipulation, property updates, copy/paste, and tab-switching to switch between devices. Actions can be replayed as a combination of text descriptions with an image icon or as a key frame animation. Recorded actions sequences can be shared to a repository, where other designers can then view them, creating a social aspect to the system. Error handling is accomplished by a smooth error assistance mechanism that works with suggestions and highlighted regions in order to guide designers towards resolving errors.

An example of D-Macs. The far right section contains recorded design actions. Source: Article.

Discussion
The idea of allowing user interfaces to easily be designed for multiple different devices seems like it would be very useful. I like that the needs of the product's intended audience (graphic user interface designers) were specifically considered when creating D-Macs. The  recording, sharing, and replaying of actions in D-Macs is designed to make their work more efficient and less time-consuming by allowing repeatable actions to be automated across platforms. I wonder if something like this could be applied to other fields in order to make them more efficient by eliminating actions that are repeated over and over again. Maybe for calculations or for programming that isn't related to user interfaces?

It would have been nice if the authors had included some user studies in the paper.  They discussed some case studies, in which various interfaces were created using D-Macs, but there was no mention of people outside of the project trying it out or discussion about people's responses towards it.