Interactive Storyboard: Animated Story Creation on Touch Interfaces

Storytelling, or the telling of narrative, plays a central role in human experience. However, prevalent tools for animated story creation are so complex that expertise is required to grasp them. To help novices such as children create a wide range of visual stories quickly and easily, in this paper we present the design and evaluation of the Interactive Storyboard, an application that enables novices to create vivid animations on touch interfaces, and further to generate live digital stories in a cooperative way. User interviews help us reach the basic assumptions of use cases and design principles for storytelling via Interactive Storyboard. The prototyping application is evaluated by potential users including children and parents, after which improvement on usability and extension of functionalities is conducted. Further usability tests indicate that the Storyboard application is easy to use, more efficient and attractive than formal tools in concrete scenarios, and effectively enhances novices' creativity.