2017-2018 Enact

Professional designers and developers often struggle with the transition between the design and implementation of custom interactive prototypes. We introduce Enact, a live environment for prototyping touch-based interactions that supports designer-developer collaboration during these transitions. Enact combines interconnected visual, symbolic and interactive representations. Designers draw the user interface and provide examples of user inputs on the target device, while developers reuse these elements directly in the state machine’s code. Enact automatically generates animated descriptions and test cases to ease iteration between design and development. A preliminary study shows that both designers and developers can create complete interaction prototypes with Enact. A second study focuses on designer-developer collaboration and shows that Enact provides new opportunities for co-creation. Based on these observations, we propose four principles for designing prototyping tools that integrate designers’ and developers’ practices: multiple viewpoints, one source of truth, reveal the invisible and design by enaction.