Tangible Experience Design Toolkit: Simplifying Cross Device Interaction Design

Cross-device environments are attracting attention from designers working on interactive experiences, as there is an increased desire to create advanced and sophisticated narratives. As these experiences increase in popularity, they use increasingly complex embedded sensor-based environments. These environments deem to be challenging for inexperienced creators as they require knowledge of networked systems. This paper explores the initial design of a toolkit that provides novice designers with an easy to use authoring and development environment for designing cross-device experiences. The toolkit uses Tangible User Interfaces in order to make cross-device development easier to understand for inexperienced designers and provide them with a robust support framework for expanding into developing more complex experiences. The toolkit is tested with a group of potential users. The conclusions from the testing, along with potential future steps, are presented in this paper.