K-Sketch: A "Kinetic" Sketch Pad for Novice Animators

Bibliography Information:

Davis, Landay. "K-Sketch: A "Kinetic" Sketch Pad for Novice Animators." 2008. CHI Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Pages 413-422. ACM New York, NY, USA ©2008

Link to Article: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1357122

K-Sketch is a system developed to present an animation platform aimed at facilitating maniuplation of animation user interfaces, mostly due to a need to learn to animate and to do so fast in the middle of meetings, classes, and other functions. Many of the features of K-Sketch include using one or two different forms of interaction, such as Alt-Click, were implemented to support multiple major animation features at once. The supported features of animation are Translate, Scale, Rotate, Set Timing, Move Relative, Appear, Disappear, Trace, Copy Motion, and Orient to Path. Another major design consideration is that this system is developed to have pen be the main method of interaction. Edits to the sketch are "recorded" as actions that can then be used as data that can be replayed as an animation. Erasing a sketch, for instance, is saved as an "action" and displayed visually as a "tick" in the time slider bar on the bottom aspect of the interface. The time slider can be manipulated backwards to allow support of animations running in parallel. For a user study, researchers had testers compare the interface experience with that of the PowerPoint animation tool. Many users reported an easier time using this interface over the PowerPoint tool, as evidence by the fact that the time spent to make similar animations was shown to take longer with PowerPoint. Users also expressed that they had an easier time learning the interface.

I think that easier animation tools, especially for use in education settings, has been in demand for a significant period of time. However, I believe some of the design decisions of the interface itself could be altered slightly. For instance, the button bar on the top could be changed into a slightly hierarchical style, where tapping and holding a pen color would expand into a wheel that would let the user choose between 8 or so colors. Cut, Paste, and Copy could also be placed under a single category. The main reason why I believe this change should be made is that modern interfaces have moved away from a large array of buttons displayed at once, since analyzing each button initially would be detrimental to the experience. For instance, a spontaneous need to sketch an animation in the middle of a meeting would lead a new user to quickly scan the toolbar. A user who only needs to sketch without any need for additional pen colors would waste valuable time and cognitive load identifying pen colors she knows she will not need. I believe these changes can further improve usage time.