DENIM and SILK - Research

The DENIM Project, led by Prof. James Landay, is focused on researching tools for designing user interfaces through informal interaction such as sketching.

Background: SILK

DENIM is an outgrowth of the original SILK project, a pen-based sketching tool for designing user interfaces. SILK combines many of the benefits of paper-based sketching with existing electronic prototyping tools. It allows designers to quickly sketch an interface using an electronic pad and stylus. SILK preserves the important properties of pencil and paper: a rough drawing can be produced quickly and the medium is flexible. However, unlike a paper sketch, this electronic sketch is interactive and can easily be annotated and modified using editing gestures. SILK allows the designer to extend the interactivity of the recognized widgets using storyboards (see below):

Prof. Landay developed SILK as part of his dissertation research under Dr. Brad Myers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.

Video

Here's a video of SILK (RealVideo, MPEG) in action.

Ongoing Research: DENIM

Through a study of web site design practice, we observed that web site designers design sites at different levels of refinement -- site map, storyboard, and individual page -- and that designers sketch at all levels during the early stages of design. However, existing web design tools do not support these tasks very well. Informed by these observations, we created DENIM, a system that helps web site designers in the early stages of design. DENIM supports sketching input, allows design at different refinement levels, and unifies the levels through zooming. We performed an informal evaluation with seven professional designers and found that they reacted positively to the concept and were interested in using such a system in their work.

There are several key differences between DENIM and SILK:

• DENIM supports more views of the design (e.g. site map) than SILK and integrates those views through zooming.
• SILK recognizes widgets that are sketched by the designer. DENIM does not (yet).

Here are some pictures of the current version of DENIM:

Some future enhancements to DENIM include:

• Adding support for widgets found in HTML forms and traditional GUIs
• Enhancing the visual sketching language to support more complex events (e.g. animation, roll-overs), conditionals, and custom widgets
• Allowing DENIM to exchange data with other web site design tools
• Generating artifacts for presentation and documentation purposes

Public Release

DENIM is available for download.

SILK is written in Common Lisp and runs on top of the Garnet system. Considering the resources Garnet requires and the need for Common Lisp on any client machine, it is difficult to release SILK to the public.