think-cell technical report TC2003/01 A GUI-based Interaction ...

7 Conclusion
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I present an outlook of future work that is required or desirable to
further pursue the goal of highly efficient slide layout. Finally, a résumé summarizes
the lessons learned from my thesis.
7.1 Future Work
During the work on the interaction concept and the user interface prototype, a lot
of ideas arose that would be worth further investigation. These ideas, which are
briefly discussed in this section, could not be realized in the scope of the present
thesis. However, the results from my thesis became part of a PowerPoint add-in
for automated layout support, which will continue to be developed and finally will
be commercially deployed. Therefore, it is not unlikely that some of the following
ideas will contribute to future releases of the software.
Constraints Spanning Multiple Slides. So far, the smart grid concept rep-
resents constraints that relate smart elements within a single slide. It is not yet
possible to create constraints between elements from different slides. In practice,
there is mainly one kind of constraint that spans across multiple slides: Certain
elements like headlines and stickers need to be placed in the same location on every
slide where they occur. As suggested in section 4.1.2, across-slide constraints could
be implemented in a straight-forward manner by global smart gridlines that are
placed at the same position on each slide.
Styles and Formatting. Although formatting options like fonts and colors are
not directly related to spatial constraints, these features play an important role in
professional slide design. In particular, consistent formatting of all elements across
all slides or even across a set of presentations must be enforced. Style templates as
they are known from standard office software address this issue, but exhibit serious
usability problems. It would be interesting to see if the concept of constraints could
also be applied to styles and formatting, and if it could help to efficiently create
consistent designs.
Animated Feedback. As suggested in section 4.2.6, animation could be very
effective to explain dynamic layout updates. Further studies with the software will
show if users understand what happens to the slide layout when the automation
takes over. I would expect that users might get confused when the self-adjusting
layout suddenly changes the appearance of a slide. Gleicher et al. [Gle92] found
that an animated transition between two states of the layout can help to explain
the effects of constraints and thus can improve the usability of an automated layout
tool.
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