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The Authoring Tool Evaluation Problem

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The Authoring Problem

Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

Abstract

Authoring tools, the software used to create, edit, and develop Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN), are a critical part of both IDN authorship and research. These tools, their features, interface paradigms, visualisations, and user experience (UX) can impact the authoring process and the resulting works, and consequently must inform our wider understanding of IDN context. While IDN research has widely explored data models for authoring tools, feature sets, and demonstrated a variety of developed tools for a range of IDN forms, it has done comparatively very little to evaluate and study the UX of these tools and their impact on authors and their works. In this chapter, we survey the existing work on authoring tools and explore the scale of this problem, the reasons for it, how the community has documented this issue, and how we might begin to tackle it. We conclude that the existing methods for the study of UX are poorly suited for the study of authoring tools, and that as well as making the study of tool UX a priority, we must also develop new methods of evaluation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://ardin.online/conferences/icids-interactive-storytelling/ as of 24/01/22.

  2. 2.

    http://nht.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ as of 24/01/22.

  3. 3.

    http://narrativeandplay.org/ais/ as of 24/01/22.

  4. 4.

    https://sigchi.org/conferences/conference-history/chi/ as of 25/01/2022.

  5. 5.

    https://sigchi.org/conferences/conference-history/chiplay/ as of 25/01/2022.

  6. 6.

    It is to be noted that, at the time of writing, a project with a UX evaluation of StoryPlaces’ authoring tool has begun but is not yet complete.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bournemouth University, Poole, UK

    Charlie Hargood & Daniel Green

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  1. Charlie Hargood
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  2. Daniel Green
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Correspondence to Charlie Hargood .

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  1. Bournemouth University, Poole, Dorset, UK

    Charlie Hargood

  2. University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    David E. Millard

  3. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Alex Mitchell

  4. Hochschule RheinMain, Wiesbaden, Hessen, Germany

    Ulrike Spierling

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Hargood, C., Green, D. (2022). The Authoring Tool Evaluation Problem. In: Hargood, C., Millard, D.E., Mitchell, A., Spierling, U. (eds) The Authoring Problem. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05214-9_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05214-9_19

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