A Novel Design Pipeline for Authoring Tools

Interactive digital narrative research presents a diverse range of authoring tools [1, 4, 8, 12, 14]. Although our field often publishes the technology, it less often publishes a refined UX design pipeline for those tools’ authoring experience. This is despite the UX of these tools long being identified as a key challenge [14] and UX design pipelines being an active area of research in adjacent technologies such as the games that sometimes deliver our stories [3, 10, 11]. We present a three-stage design pipeline targeting the creation of interactive narrative authoring tools that is informed by existing design pipelines that consider the user and their experience at all stages. We then detail our own application of this pipeline to the design of a new authoring tool, reporting on the methodologies, analyses, and findings of each step.