interaction design

As digital technology continues to reshape communication and content consumption, collaboration and collective ideation have become fundamental to modern web technologies. Interactive articles aim to encourage active information exploration to foster knowledge creation. However, the integration of collaboration and tools like the infinite canvas remains unexplored in this context. This thesis investigates the opportunities and limitations of this area. It presents an exploration of the infinite canvas and examines its strengths and challenges for collaborative interactive articles. Through the design and implementation of an application built for Miro, a web-based platform utilizing the infinite canvas for creative collaboration, it investigates the design process for the infinite canvas. In a thinking-aloud user study, this thesis evaluates this application and its integration in this environment. This revealed that the infinite canvas offers an immersive virtual space, though collaborative artifact design introduces unique challenges. The distinction between shared and individual artifacts underscores the importance of considering the collaborative artifact space. Providing a clear user experience proved to be crucial, especially for inexperienced users. Tasks and input methods for end-users need to be kept simple. This thesis identifies two distinct user roles for the design of collaborative interactive articles: facilitators who guide group activities and participants who seek insights. It adopts the idea of Gamestorming as a framework for goal-driven collaboration to facilitate group work and provide engaging activities. Combined with semantic information present on an infinite canvas, this opens up further use cases. Moreover, information visualization techniques highlight possibilities to create engaging and interactive artifacts on the infinite canvas. In the context of visual analytics, the infinite canvas acts as a dynamic visual database, enabling direct interaction with data entities and relationships. Consequently, information visualizations can provide an overview of the infinite canvas and enhance the exploration of content. In the end, this thesis contributes to the collaborative and interactive potential of the infinite canvas, offering insights for the design of interactive articles and explorable visualizations.