Research On Storyboard-based User Interface Prototyping Tool And Its Implementation

User Interface (UI) design plays an important role in system design. For the purpose of enhancing usability and embodying the principle of User-Centered Design (UCD), Users should involve into design activities, such as creating interface prototype and interpreting the interactive actions, as early as possible. Moreover, it is useful for improving rapid iteration, acquiring evaluation.Instead of focusing on the significant conceptual design, current interactive tools for the UI design are mainly on the physical design. They concentrate mainly on the design details and require coding for specifying the interactions that are beyond the ability of widgets. Therefore, it is not easy for the users to participate in the design side by side.The main work in this thesis can be viewed in two folds: at first, we describe an interactive design tool implemented by us, based on the electronic sketch and storyboard technology for supporting the early stages of conceptual interface design. It allows the illustration of the dynamic behavior between interface elements without coding and complicated dialogue activities. Secondly, with the enhanced intrinsic usability, the tool is more flexible, natural and easy to use. It allows for rapidly UI prototyping towards creative task, improving iteration and evaluation activities of interface design.In this thesis, usability principles and user-centered iteration design are discussed firstly. The role of storyboard is analyzed in detail, and then, the sketch design and recognition arithmetic are introduced. Furthermore, the Context-Directed Interaction Modeling is studied, and the design process of an interactive user interface prototyping tool is proposed, which is based on interaction design process and traditional software engineering. And then, the interactive design tool is designed and implemented using this design process. The tool, which combines many of the benefits of electronic sketch with storyboard technology, allows for rapidly creating and testing the low-fidelity prototype in the early stages of conceptual interface design.Our evaluation shows that it is an effective tool for interface designers to accomplish basic design tasks and communicate the resulting design ideas to other members of engineering team.