Reading 4 : K-Sketch

Citaiton:
K-sketch: A kinetic sketch pad for novice animators
RC Davis, B Colwell, JA Landay
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System
Publication Link

Summary:
This paper discusses a scratchpad, K-Sketch that has been developed keeping in mind the primary needs of animators, while maintaining a simplistic interface.  The usage scenarios for this application were compiled after a series of interviews with both professional animators and amateurs.  The paper then discusses how the final set of possible animations was arrived at by modelling the supported animations against the number of steps and percentage of scenarios that were covered in that many steps, as an optimization problem. It then details the functionalities available in K-Sketch, and its trial run with users coming from a variety of backgrounds. Finally, the implications, results and comparisons of K-Sketch with conventional animation tools are discussed.

Discussion:
The main takeaways from this paper are:

• Surveying the needs of target users is always the first step of building any user interface.
• There is a trade-off between allowing a large variety of functions and minimizing then number of steps.
• Smaller learning curve is often preferred to perfection when it comes to learning something new or building informal mock ups.
• Some of the core functionalities include coordinated motions, overwriting and adding motion, ghosts, copy pasting and recording.