Eve: A Sketch-based Software Prototyping Workbench

Prototyping involves the evolution of an idea into various stages of design until it reaches a certain level of maturity. These design stages include low, medium and high fidelity prototypes. Workload analysis of prototyping using NASA-TLX showed an increase in workload specifically in frustration, temporal demand, effort, and decline in performance as the participants progressed from low to high fidelity. Upon reviewing numerous commercial and academic tools that directly or indirectly support software prototyping in one aspect or another, we identified a need for a comprehensive solution to support the entire software prototyping process. In this paper, we introduce Eve, a prototyping workbench that enables the users to sketch their concept as low fidelity prototype. It generates the consequent medium and high fidelity prototypes by means of UI element detection and code generation. We evaluated Eve using SUS with 15 UI/UX designers; the results depict good usability and high learnability (Usability score: 78.5). In future, we aim to study the impact of Eve on subjective workload experienced by users during software prototyping.