Early Stage of Community-Driven UI/UX Refactoring of the Open-Source ATON Framework
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Date
2025
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
The digitisation of cultural heritage has become a central practice in recent years, responding to the needs for the preservation, enhancement and study of cultural assets. The increasing production of digital resources has seen the development of online platforms for visualising and sharing 3D models and 360 panoramas, also facilitating access and management of this type of data. The democratisation of these tools, coupled with their increasing user-friendliness, has expanded and diversified the scientific communities involved, widening the catchment area from a single audience of experts to general users. This has led to the emergence of new needs on the part of the users involved, necessitating a re-evaluation of the logic underpinning the consumption of digital services. This paper analyses the case study of ATON: an open-source framework design for creating Web3D/WebXR apps interacting with CH objects and 3D scenes on the Web, which underwent a complete refactoring of the User eXperience (UX) and User Interface (UI) through the H2IOSC project. Starting with the analysis of the framework and its structure, we define which parts are involved in the complete refactoring. We discuss the milestones of the application's development from 2015 to the present, through the framework's increasing involvement in national and international project activities, highlighting the evolving user needs and implementations of new tools and functionalities through a bottom-up design approach. We first illustrate the community's role in the co-creation of ATON and its involvement in UX and UI refactoring activities. We present user research and design parts. Through the research plan, we describe the project from the objectives and research questions, debating the chosen methodologies, the target audience involved and the expected results. Finally, we present and discuss the choices related to the design process, covering the conceptualization of essential components, the development of the Design System (DS), and its implementation as a renewed built-in UI module. We also explore its integration into various ready-to-use blueprints and templates, analysing how it improves performance in the development phase. Additionally, we examine the trade-offs encountered in the components' abstraction level definition and the selection of suitable UI libraries by comparing existing solutions.
Description
CCS Concepts: Human-centered computing → User interface toolkits; User centered design; User interface design; Interface design prototyping; User centered design; Interactive systems and tools; User interface design; User interface toolkits; Interface design prototyping; User centered design; Interactive systems and tools
@inproceedings{10.2312:dh.20253115,
booktitle = {Digital Heritage},
editor = {Campana, Stefano and Ferdani, Daniele and Graf, Holger and Guidi, Gabriele and Hegarty, Zackary and Pescarin, Sofia and Remondino, Fabio},
title = {{Early Stage of Community-Driven UI/UX Refactoring of the Open-Source ATON Framework}},
author = {Amadei, Chiara Florise and Massidda, Marcello and Menconero, Sofia and Gosti, Giorgio and Fanini, Bruno},
year = {2025},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-277-6},
DOI = {10.2312/dh.20253115}
}