The Genarrator Authoring Experience: A UX Evaluation Approach

The Genarrator platform provides a user-friendly online visual interface toolset for the creation and hosting of interactive hypertext multi-media stories. Offered as a free-to-use tool, it currently hosts more than 1300 working narratives. While there is existing research on the reader experience with this kind of technology and the narratives it offers, comparatively little is known about the author experience. To further explore the findings from an online survey involving 24 interactive narrative undergraduate and postgraduate students who had used Genarrator for an assignment, we decided to conduct a small usability test study with those students who previously provided feedback on the tool. We employed observations, interviews, and analysis of their story-creation process to understand their overall experience. We conclude that our user experience approach, albeit limited, allowed us to observe usefully how authors use Genarrator and recognise conceptual differences between how we as tool creators see the tool and how our participants as authors view it as users.