Damask: A Tool for Early-Stage Design and Prototyping of Multi-Device User Interfaces

People often use a variety of computing devices, such as PCs, PDAs, and cell phones, to access the same information. The user interface to this information needs to be different for each device, due to different input and output constraints. Currently, designers designing such multi-device user interfaces either have to design a UI separately for each device, which is time consuming, or use a program to automatically generate interfaces, which often results in interfaces that are awkward. We are creating a system called Damask to better support multi-device UI design. With Damask, the designer will design a UI for one device, by sketching the design and by specifying which design patterns the interface uses. The patterns will help Damask generate user interfaces optimized for the other target devices. The generated interfaces will be of sufficient quality so that it will be more convenient to use Damask than to design each of the other interfaces separately, and the ease with which designers will be able to create designs will encourage them to engage in iterative design.