The User Experience of Interactive Digital Storytelling

“The User Experience of Interactive Digital Storytelling: Theory and Measurement” – ICIDS 2011 Workshop

Organizers: Christian Roth (Center for Adv. Media Research Amsterdam)
Peter Vorderer (Mannheim University)
Christoph Klimmt (Hanover University)
Ivar Vermeulen (VU University Amsterdam)
When & Where: 1.00 pm to 5.00 pm, SFU Surrey room # 2740
Intended Audience: The workshop is intended for creators of IDS systems, researchers and everybody who is interested in the user experience, methodology and underlying concepts of interactive digital storytelling. Participants don’t need any specific skills, some basic background in empirical research is helpful but not mandatory.

Call for Workshop Participation

This workshop is dedicated to discussing the user experience of Interactive Digital Stories (IDS) and the empirical measurement of it. Although technology development has made substantial progress, theory and empirical studies on the user perspective have not received much attention in the community so far. The workshop introduces a measurement toolkit for testing user experiences of IDS software and stimulates discussion on conceptual as well as methodological issues in user-focused research on IDS.
This toolkit comes as a set of self-report measures to be applied immediately after users finish exposure to an Interactive Story. It is based on theoretical foundations, expert interviews, and benchmarking studies conducted with different media and prototypes of IDS, which will be presented. Its purpose is to provide an easy-to-handle application for system creators that allows conducting rapid user studies with new prototypes and comparing a system’s performance with data obtained from other systems. The toolkit is available as a software application that enables mostly automatized data collection and analysis.
Participants will learn how to use the measurement toolkit effectively and methodological issues related to the user experience will be discussed. The workshop is planned as a half-day event (4 hours). It relies on impulse presentations and discussion rounds that involve participants as experts in Entertainment Computing and Interactive Storytelling.