Central Concerns and Questions

Today's professionals must make more complex decisions faster and in collaboration with more people than ever before. Information technology can help with productivity and modeling tools, but current tools are bloated with features that focus users' attention more on polish and less on substance. We are investigating methods and tools for boiling interfaces down to their essential components, allowing us to build systems that help people solve complex problems quickly and with minimal distractions. Many of our systems use pen-based input, as drawing is medium that all of us use to express ourselves directly and succinctly. We are currently investigating two domains: short, rough animations and simple games or simulations. Both can be used either to rapidly model complex ideas or to collaboratively prototype multimedia content. Other business modeling domains will be added in the near future.

Emerging Ideas and Initiatives

We use a new technique called interface optimization to analyze user tasks and the primitive operations that can be used to accomplish them. Once a library of tasks has been collected and coded, this technique uses optimization methods to help interface designers visualize design tradeoffs and create interfaces that maximize speed and expressivity while minimizing complexity. We also use novel Wizard of Oz techniques for evaluating early-stage prototypes of pen-based user interfaces.

Selected Publications

[1] Richard C. Davis, Brien Colwell, and James A. Landay. K-Sketch: A “Kinetic” Sketch Pad for Novice Animators. Proceedings of CHI 2008, Florence, Italy, April 5-10, 2008, pp. 413-422.

[2] Richard C. Davis, T. Scott Saponas, Michael Shilman, and James A. Landay. SketchWizard: Wizard of Oz Prototyping of Pen-based User Interfaces. Proceedings of UIST'07, Newport, RI, October 7-10 2007, pp. 119-128.

Projects, Presentations and Posters

1. Richard C. Davis, K-Sketch Project (webpage)
2. Richard C. Davis, K-Sketch 1.0 User Guide (project)
3. Richard C. Davis, K-Sketch: The Kinetic Sketch Pad (presentation)