Tangible report

Viability of a tangible tabletop for industry storyboarding
Katherine Rix
2015

Abstract

The intuitiveness and ease of learning of tangible user interfaces (TUIs) is well-established in HCI literature. Despite this, few TUI-based applications have been developed for industry, leaving open the question of their suitability to high-expertise tasks. To investigate this, we tailored a TUI-based storyboarding application to purpose through expert interview, prototyping and heuristic evaluation before presenting it to animation professionals. Twenty participants used the system to create 3D scenes from storyboard sketches. An all-positive system usability scale (SUS) was administered, benchmarking the system's usability at 78.0 or "good". A second, diagnostic questionnaire revealed that the system was fun to use but too slow - professionals have strong time-saving requirements due to deadline pressure. Furthermore, observed user behavior and qualitative post-session interviews strongly suggest that, even with performance improvements, applicability to the animation industry is severely curtailed by insufficiently fine-grained control, lack of model flexibility, and lack of innate mechanisms for common, critical actions like "undo".

Online addenda

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