ZOIL

Members

Hans-Christian Jetter, Harald Reiterer, Roman Rädle

Description

The ZOIL project (Zoomable Object-Oriented Information Landscape) is concerned with supporting designers and developers of post-WIMP interactive spaces during interaction design and UI implementation.

ZOIL formulates a technological paradigm. This ZOIL paradigm consists of three components:

• The six ZOIL design principles that define ZOIL’s interaction style and provide “golden rules” to support interaction designers.
• The ZOIL software framework that supports developers during the implementation of post-WIMP interactive spaces for collaborative knowledge work and enables the realization of ZOIL’s design principles in practice.
• The four example prototypes based on ZOIL that can serve as exemplars for designers and developers likewise.

During the project, each of the six ZOIL design principles was derived from literature of disciplines related to Human-Computer Interaction including Ubiquitous Computing, Information Visualization, Computer-supported Cooperative Work, Cognitive Science, Personal Information Management, and Software Engineering.

Their formulation is empirically validated and extended by own experiences made during applying them in the four ZOIL example prototypes for different application domains (e.g., e-Science, collaborative search, creative design) and the findings from own user studies.

Furthermore, the project introduces the new open-source ZOIL software framework for implementing post-WIMP interactive spaces that follow the ZOIL design principles

A complete description of the project and its results can be found in the PhD thesis about ZOIL by Hans-Christian Jetter.