Yarn

Writing is one of the oldest human activities, dating back as far as 3200 BCE. This paper provides an industrial case study about understanding the creative writing process using interviews and directed storytelling on aspiring and established writers and educators, performed during a one year capstone project, where teams of HCI students pair up with industrial designers and developers in order to solve a real world design problem. After 26 interviews and 55 hours of analysis, four concepts were used as dimensions to analyse creative writing applications: serendipity, haven, evolution and shuffle. Based on these ideas, we developed a series of prototypes by gradually increasing the fidelity of each successive prototype and making changes elicited from user feedback. The culmination of our process is Yarn, a new writing application. Yarn helps writers "unravel their story." With Yarn, a writer can (i) Play with structure; (ii) Easily move chunks of writing; (ii) Create alternatives of sections, and (iv) Write in a beautiful distraction-free way.