Yang Li

curriculum vitae selected publications
research statement teaching statement

 

University of Washington
Computer Science & Engineering
Paul G. Allen Center 506
Seattle, WA 98195-2350 USA
(206) 685-2036
yangli AT cs DOT washington DOT edu

Topiary: Tools for Prototyping Location-Enhanced Applications

Applications that use the location of people, places, and things will experience tremendous growth in the near future. However, it currently requires a high level of technical expertise to build location-enhanced applications. To address this problem we created Topiary, a tool for rapidly prototyping location-enhanced applications.

Topiary lets designers create a map that models the location of people, places, and things; use this active map to demonstrate scenarios depicting location contexts; use these scenarios in creating storyboards that describe interaction sequences; and then run these storyboards on mobile devices, with a wizard updating the location of people and things on a separate device.

We also designed BrickRoad, a tool that allows designers to spontaneoulsy design location-enhanced applications without specifying any interaction logic. BrickRoad, as a front end of Topiary, is used to collect interaction scenario data that can be processed in Topiary for generating functional location prototypes.

Video, Papers and Software of the Topiary System

Talks

BrickRoad Paper