HCC: Small: Better Tools for Authoring Interactive Behaviors

网页和大多数其他为计算机创建的东西都是交互式的，因为它们会对人们使用它们所做的事情做出反应。他们有动画，按钮，导致信息的变化，和游戏人物，移动下一个人的控制。创建这些“交互行为”通常需要编写程序，通常使用传统的编程语言，如C++，JavaScript或Adobe的Flash。然而，这对绝大多数不知道如何编程的人来说是一个障碍。特别是，有一大类人，通常被称为“交互设计师”，他们接受过如何制作更美观和可用的交互行为的培训，但他们不是专业的程序员，因此不能自己创建这些部分。研究表明，他们确实认为编程是创建和改进交互行为的主要障碍。交互设计师能够自己创建行为的一个重要原因是，通过快速创建、尝试和修改行为，他们能够创造性地探索和开发新的更好的设计。本研究的最终目标是提供一种新的工具，使交互设计师和其他非专业程序员能够以更自然的方式创建具有交互行为的系统。为了实现这一目标，研究人员将首先研究设计师和其他人如何看待互动行为。这将提供关于如何更“自然”地表达这些行为的见解，这意味着一个人如何以接近于他思考所需结果的方式来指示计算机。初步研究表明，设计师不像专业程序员那样思考行为。接下来，研究人员将使用这些关于自然表达的知识来创建一个新的创作工具，这将使设计师更容易创建自己的交互行为。该工具的初始设计使用了设计人员熟悉的技术，例如Adobe Photoshop或Microsoft PowerPoint等程序的绘图模型、Microsoft Excel等电子表格的计算样式以及基于事件的样式（例如：“当子弹与宇宙飞船相交时，那么宇宙飞船应该开始爆炸动画”），这已经被发现是表达这些行为的自然方式。其结果将是新的知识和工具，使更多的人更容易获得编程，从而扩大了可以编程的人的范围，同时特别使交互设计师能够创建自己的行为。

Web pages and most other things created for computers are interactive, in that they respond to what people do with them. They have animations, buttons that cause information to change, and game characters that move around under a person's control. Creating these "interactive behaviors" has usually required writing programs, usually in a conventional programming language such as C++, JavaScript, or Adobe's Flash. However, this is a barrier to the vast majority of people who do not know how to program. In particular, there is a large class of people, often called "interaction designers", who are trained in how to make more aesthetic and usable interactive behaviors, but who are not professional programmers, and therefore cannot create these parts by themselves. Research shows that they do identify programming as the main barrier to creating and improving interactive behaviors. One reason that it is important that interaction designers be able to create the behaviors themselves is because by quickly creating, trying out and modifying the behaviors, they are able to creatively explore and develop new and better designs.The ultimate goal of this research is to provide a new tool that enables interaction designers and other non-professional programmers to create systems with interactive behaviors in a more natural way. To achieve this, investigators will first study how designers and other people think about interactive behaviors. This will provide insight about how such behaviors can be expressed more "naturally", which means how a person can instruct a computer in a way that is close to the way the person is thinking about the desired result. Preliminary studies show that designers do not think about behaviors in the same way as professional programmers. Next, the investigators will use this knowledge about the natural expressions to create a new authoring tool which will make it much easier for designers to create their own interactive behaviors. The initial design for the tool uses techniques that are familiar to designers, such as the drawing model of programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft PowerPoint, the computation style of spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel, and the event-based style (such as: "when a bullet intersects a spaceship, then the spaceship should start the blowing-up animation"), which has been found to be a natural way to express these behaviors. The result will be new knowledge and tools that will make programming more accessible to more people, and thus broaden the range of people who can program, while specifically enabling interaction designers to create their own behaviors.