StoryKit : Designing a Mobile Application for Story Creation By Children And Older Adults

As the capabilities of smartphones and similar mobile devices advance, opportunities increase to use them for meaningful creative tasks. Incorporating text, images, and sounds in documents is commonplace when using desktop office or graphics software. However, multimedia authoring interfaces for mobile devices remain undeveloped. Working with a participatory design group composed of children, older adults, and researchers, we developed StoryKit, an iPhone application for creating and sharing audio-visual stories on an iPhone. Our initial goal was to support children making stories together with older adults as a form of informal learning. To that end, it lets users create books on the touchscreen device by arranging their text, photos, drawings, and sounds on pages, and then sharing them via e-mail and the web. The design of StoryKit uncovered solutions to several general interface challenges that affect a wide range of mobile authoring applications. Thus, we think elements of the StoryKit interaction design may serve as a starting point for developers of mobile document authoring applications.

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