Designing Gestural Interfaces

DOCUMENTING GESTURES IN INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS

Designers and developers currently use various forms of documentation to demonstrate and specify what a product should be. Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, we can use this existing documentation, combined with some of the best practices of existing movement notation systems, to help document gestural interfaces.

It should be noted that no single kind of document will work for all situations; when it comes to documentation, there is no magic bullet or "one ring to rule them all," just a set of techniques that can be applied based on the needs of the system and how the team operates.

SCENARIOS

Scenarios are sketches with words. They are stories about what it will be like to use the system once it has been made and the context in which it will be used. Consider this example for a touchscreen mobile device in a theme park:

"When she purchases her entrance ticket, Lily is handed the ParkPass device. Glancing at it, she sees the main screen has a map on it and one area is blinking. She touches the blinking area, and the map zooms in and shows that a parade will take place in that part of the park in 15 minutes.She's not interested in that and instead wants to see what rides are nearby, so using a slider she zooms out from the map, then taps a button to display rides on the map. The rides appear and she taps one to select it; information about the ride, including the wait time, is then displayed."

This scenario took only a few minutes ...