Problem

By finding out which part should we improve for slide-making tools, on the one hand, we did introspection by ourselves, asked about what was the breakdown we met during using these tools last time. On the other hand, we did depth-interview to these tools' users, asked about their breakdowns while using them. We concluded the problems we got from the introspection and interviews, found out users' pain shows as below:

Concept Design

Based on these problems, we decided to design a new boundary object. We conducted the concepts in these three parts, to make our boundary more complete.

• Alignment&Spacing
Reify the distance around the element as a new object “boundary”, element not out+other elements can’t go across, safe distance, directly manipulate the distance and keep relative position stable.
• Overlap
Improve concept, why there is only 2D depth besides width+height. We go across if it is not in the same depth. With this depth property, solve another problem found in interview, overlap, hard to choose the one in the bottom without moving away others.
• Animation
Add animation on the boundary, add material, effects based on physical principles, special interesting animation in a easier way

Justification

Firstly, three intrumental design principles are well applied on the design concept, we reified the distance around object as boundary, as you can see below, the blue rectangle represents the boundary that around the text. And polymorphism, this simple boundary can be applied on any objects that you created in slides, text, image, shape and even the group shapes, as what shown in the video, you could have group shape in one boundary or group shapes with multiple boundaries. Then reuse principle, we allow user to reuse the output of boundary, which means they could copy and paste any boundary they created and give them to other objects.

Participatory Design

There is no doubt that the mental modal from users might be different with ours, therefore we made a participantory design with users, and we did get some different informations during this period. The tasks setting document is here.
After comparision those with ours, we designed 6 interaction points in our boundary, like create boundary, manipulate boundary and set boundary’s property, some of them have different branches.
The details we showed in the video prototype.

Walkthrough

We shared our video prototype with other group in walkthrough, got many useful feedbacks, that helped us to add some new interaction points, and also mede us redefine some previous version.

Conclusion

Of course we had a lot of problems during the design period. At the begining, our polymorphism and reuse were not clear. We all used digital platform to show our boundary’s work, but we didn’t realize that may limited our design, made the video more like a marketing video. And we also had disagreements with interaction points, for example, we defined create boundary with different branches, toolbar, rightclick and some other normal ways to trriger, we just design as usual without considering which way is more convenient and easier for user. And our boundary only have the normal porperties, therefore we add the depth to make it solve the overlap more efficiate.

For the future work, first we’d like to get some feedback about our video from yours, and of course we need to dicuss more details about our boundary to find more possible functions. Also we found some extreme users(obsessive) from our participantory design, we may design some parts for the exterm cases. Due to our boundary has depth property, we'd like to add some 3D animation effects with our boundary in the future.