Tutorial Introduction

This tutorial that leads you through the basics of an activity-based prototyping process for designing a set of coordinated ubicomp applications, including human activity modeling, interaction behavior prototyping and prototype testing both locally and in-situ. An activity-based ubicomp prototyping process includes four steps:

Collecting field data about people's everyday activities regarding the design domain of interest. Note that this step is not supported by ActivityDesigner. You might use whatever way you like to conduct a field study and collect data. The data can be images, video clips, textual comments and structured data such as questionnair surveys. The data can be organized in any ways but ActivityDesigner prefers that the data for each observation is organized in a separate folder for the batch processing.
Analyzing and modeling activities based on the collected field data . The modeled activities will be the building blocks for constructing functional prototypes, e.g., they can be used to trigger an application behavior or specify activity queries.
Creating functional prototypes based on the modeled activities . ActivityDesigner uses a storyboarding approach as the major way for depicting interaction logic and also provides features such as scripting and programming by demonstration for specifying richer interaction behaviors.
Testing a design either locally for debugging purposes or in-situ . ActivityDesigner can generate prototypes that can run indepedently. So you can deploy the prototypes to a target device such as a mobile phone (with an Opera browser installed), a Mac and PCs.