Modeling Everyday Activities As Scenes

ActivityDesigner allows a media-rich representation of activities. A designer adds concrete scenarios about everyday life to a design as scenes, which are arranged horizontally at the top of the screen. A scene has four parts: 

• the action performed in the scene represented by the textual label at the top; 
• the media (images or video clips) in the middle, which represent the scene visually;
• the situation in which the action is performed, described by the textual label at the bottom; 
• comments (unstructured textual notes), displayed at the bottom only when it is expanded (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Expanded scenes. The comments for each scene are shown at the bottom with roles highlighted in blue.

Designers can add a single scene by clicking on the New Scene shadow. To make it easy to add field data, which might be collected in various forms, ActivityDesigner makes no assumptions on how data being added into a scene is structured. Designers can also automatically im-port a set of data into a new collection of scenes. By mak-ing scenes visible in the design process, it helps designers to picture usage scenarios in their mind and orient their design decisions towards real user needs.