Locative Authoring: Evaluating the StoryPlaces Authoring Tool

Abstract

Locative Narrative is a form of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) where the readers' location and movement are the main form of interaction. The StoryPlaces platform provides a general toolset for the creation and delivery of these location aware stories. However, while there is existing research on the reader experience with this technology, comparatively little is known about the author experience. We recruited five interactive narrative design students to participate in a usability test of the StoryPlaces pattern-based authoring tool, using observations, interviews, and analysis of their stories to understand their experience. We show that while participants superficially liked the interface of the StoryPlaces authoring tool, they had difficulty understanding the aspects that were less clearly visualised and struggled to test their creations. The patterns enabled them to add complex functionality easily but became a barrier if they wanted to deviate from them. Our findings mostly support Green's five principles of IDN authoring (on the value of visual metaphors and fast track testing), but suggests they need refinement as in application it was important to distinguish between the visualisation of different aspects of the story (location vs. logical structures), and that failure to properly visualise sometimes led to avoidance or displacement of activity rather than a drop in its quality.

The Genarrator Authoring Experience: A UX Evaluation Approach

“…The participants were given an hour to experiment with the tool and continue writing the part-completed story, which was an adaptation of the classic Grimm fairy tale 'Hansel and Gretel'. This approach of having participants finish a prepared story has been used previously with success [8] and permits an evaluation of an authoring tool without the extended longitudinal effort of the author writing an entire story from scratch, while also ensuring the author engages in more than the limited set up activities of a cold start. During the task the first author/researcher was present as an observer and made notes on the process without interfering with the author's task unless to answer any questions the authors had while authoring.…”

“…Like many IDN tools, Genarrator is an authoring tool lacking any formal user experience (UX) evaluation [6][7][8][9]. There is a significant gap in our understanding of this, and we wanted to take a small step forward in conducting a small-scale evaluation using Genarrator, since it has been used in higher education and in community settings since 2010 and has produced around 1300 fully functioning IDNs.…”

“…Thus, we used a small number of people as a steppingstone for approaching the improvement of Genarrator by employing UX methodologies and incorporating feedback from authors of the tool. We were inspired by a similar approach that proved effective in a previous study [8], and we considered that a usability evaluation of the tool with people who have used it before would help us understand the efficacy of the tool in supporting authorship, and the influence some of its particular design features and authoring paradigms may invoke during that authoring process: Genarrator uses, for example the concept of the narrative map, which displays the structure resulting from authoring decisions, rather than the paradigm used by e.g. Twine 1 in which the map is the designing tool.…”

“…IDN authorship can be supported by a range of tools which help authors to create content and define narrative logic [8]. The definition of what is an 'authoring tool' is a topic of some discussion in the community however, broadly speaking, applications designed to assist in the creation of IDN works can be considered authoring tools [11]- [12].…”