GAMBIT: Addressing Multi-platform Collaborative Sketching with HTML5 Ugo Braga Sangiorgi Louvain Interaction Laboratory, Universit´ e catholique de Louvain Pl. Place des Doyens, 1 - B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) ugo.sangiorgi@uclouvain.be Jean Vanderdonckt Louvain Interaction Laboratory, Universit´ e catholique de Louvain Pl. Place des Doyens, 1 - B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) jean.vanderdonckt@uclouvain.be ABSTRACT Prototypes are essential tools for design activities since they allow designers to realize and evaluate ideas in early stages of the development. Sketching is a primary tool for constructing prototypes of interactive systems and has been used in devel- oping low-fidelity prototypes for a long time. The computa- tional support for sketching has been receiving a recurrence of interest in the last 45 years and again nowadays within the mobile web context, where there are diverse devices to be considered. The tool presented on this paper was built with HTML5 and Javascript in order to run on any device with browsing ca- pabilities, for the main purpose of aiding an investigation on addressing issues of multi-platform collaborative sketching. Author Keywords Electronic sketching; Multi-platform systems; Collaborative design; Prototyping. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2 User Interfaces: Prototyping INTRODUCTION A prototype is a working model built to develop and test de- sign ideas. In User Interface design, prototypes are essential tools for fostering discussion regarding both interface and in- teraction with stakeholders. Techniques such as Paper Pro- totyping [17] became very popular due to its’ low cost and efficiency, since they are made using sketches for quick gen- eration of prototypes. Lately, there has been a recurrence of interest on supporting electronic sketching (i.e. sketching at electronic devices and interactive surfaces), and despite sketching recognition to be fairly well addressed on the literature, the adoption of elec- tronic sketching as a design tool is still a challenge [7]. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. EICS’12, June 25–26, 2012, Copenhagen, Denmark. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1168-7/12/06...$10.00. The current popularization of touch screen devices and the multi-platform capabilities made possible by using HTML5 might pose new opportunities for researchers to explore, for instance, how designers use sketching to prototype interfaces for a target device by producing and testing them on the de- vice itself. When designing, people draw things in different ways, which allows them to also perceive the problem in new ways. People engage in a sort of conversation with their sketches in a tight cycle of drawing, understanding, and interpreting [15]. When prototyping by using the target device, other elements come into play in that conversation. Nowadays, there are many de- vices available for designers to sketch upon [9], with different screen sizes, weight and processing capabilities; this is a fact to be addressed in current sketching research. We introduce GAMBIT, a multi-platform collaborative tool for User Interface design that allows the sketching and simu- lation of UI’s on many different devices. The tool is an essential part of a research on sketching, whose goal is to investigate electronic sketching usage in current UI design practices taking into account the multi-platform con- text for producing and validating interactive prototypes. The system’s core contepts are: 1. Sketch-based - electronic sketching is supported as the main mode of interaction, it is used to quickly put ideas on an external medium, where they can be discussed, im- proved and stored for further reference [4]; 2. Multi-platform - for it allows users to sketch using the de- vice of their preference, and also allows the prototyping and testing of systems on the very device it is intented to run. The system was built with HTML5 and Javascript in order to run on any device with browsing capabilities, through a browser or embedded into a native application; 3. Collaborative - for it focus on group sessions, allowing not only designers to sketch and discuss together, but also to include end users in the process. This paper is organized as follows: in the next section we mo- tivate the system construction together with the related works. Section 3 presents the requirements gathered in order to sup- port design sessions. Section 4 presents the system’s archi- tecture and we conclude on Section 5. 1