K-sketch: a'kinetic'sketch pad for novice animators

Paper
Davis, Richard C., Brien Colwell, and James A. Landay. "K-sketch: a'kinetic'sketch pad for novice animators." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2008.
Publication Link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1357122

Summary

This paper discusses the development and assessment of an animation tool for novices and experts. The paper covers requirements gathering, discusses major themes that intersect the needs of expert animators, and novices (people who want to but haven't delved into animation). The work is compared with Flash and more thoroughly with Microsoft Powerpoint.

Discussion

Pros

A very thorough user requirements phase and a sizable user evaluation. The authors give a clear description of the final features that were incorporated into the tool and how and why they were selected.

Cons.

I am not sure that either comparison (Flash or Microsoft Powerpoint) was appropriate. Flash, as the authors indicate, is very complicated for a novice, while Microsoft is not primarily an animation tool. And so one would expect it to perform poorly when compared with a tool that's primarily designed for animation.