Paper Reading #13: D-Macs

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Reference Information:

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

Authors: Jan Meskens, Dris Luyten, Karin Coninx

Presentation: (Conference Paper) UIST 2010/2009

Summary: In today's technology, developers need to adapt or deploy application in multiple platforms: interactive TVs, mobile phones, tablet PCs, and more. If suitable User Interfaces will be design manually for each platform, this would be time consuming and repetitive. According to the authors, there is not yet a system that can automate the transformation and design of UIs across platforms. This paper present D-Macs, a multi-device design tool.

Figure 1: In DMacs,
designers can demonstrate an
action sequence, share these action sequences with
other designers and replay previously recorded actions.

Design tool Macros (D-Macs) is a multi-device GUI builder that allows designers to design a UI interface only one, and automatically obtaining the equivalent devices. It supports three major steps: 1) the designer "demonstrates" the sequence of actions that needs to be automated. 2) There is a repository where designers can share their recorded steps. 3) There are replay and edit capabilities.

D-Macs are developed in the basis of multi-device user interface design, programming by demonstration and community shared expertise. A description of the key features of D-Macs is given, an overview of interaction techniques and UI elements they offer, as well as the architecture and implementation details are discussed. 

Currently, designers need to search through the repository for the action sequences that were previously stored, and decide by themselves if it is something useful for the current design. The developers believe that this effort can be lowered by developing a recommendation system that will display relevant action sequences that designers can choose from. In the future, the designers of D-Macs want to release it as an open source software.

Discussion: In recent discussions with teammates the topic of developing software for different devices has come up. It made me realize the importance of this area, since in today's world we as users want to have the same software capabilities in every device we own (my point of view as a user!). I would really like to read more about this topic, and see how an application like this one can reduce the repetitiveness of designing UI for various devices.