The authoring tool evaluation problem.

Abstract

Authoring tools, the software used to create, edit, and develop Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN), are a critical part of both IDN authorship and research. These tools, their features, interface paradigms, visualisations, and user experience (UX) can impact the authoring process and the resulting works, and consequently must inform our wider understanding of IDN context. While IDN research has widely explored data models for authoring tools, feature sets, and demonstrated a variety of developed tools for a range of IDN forms, it has done comparatively very little to evaluate and study the UX of these tools and their impact on authors and their works. In this chapter we survey the existing work on authoring tools and explore the scale of this problem, the reasons for it, how the community has documented this issue, and how we might begin to tackle it. We conclude that existing methods for the study of UX are poorly suited for the study of authoring tools, and that as well as making the study of tool UX a priority we must also develop new methods of evaluation.