Overview

The user interface is designed to support writing interactive workflows in the best possible way. The key challange is to make information quickly and easily accessible when you need it. A non-linear story project is full of cross-references, like dialogues pointing at characters, characters being placed in locations and so on. Also, you will want to have information side-by-side - for example to read a character's profile while you write his or her dialogue. All this needs to run smootly in multi-user environments.

In short, the articy:draft interface resembles a web browser and file explorer as to the general layout, tabbed browsing and navigation. In addition to that, there are specialized "views" for the various content types.

Here's an overview screenshot:
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The general idea

The object structure

All data you create within articy:draft is stored in a hierarchical object structure:

This object structure can best be viewed in the Navigator. It comes with some pre-defined system folders (orange folders in the image above, please note System folders cannot be deleted), like "Flow", "Entities", "Locations", etc. and allows you to organize your data in your own user-generated sub-folder structure (blue folder icons with blue names) User content is displayed in white. Yellow entries are user selected Favorites.

Multiple views on objects

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Each of the objects 1 in the project structure supports a set of views: specialized editors for certain aspects of the object. For example, the folder "Main characters" in the image above can be viewed in the list view 2, tiles view 3, localization view 4, or the properties view 5, which is essentially a property sheet for description texts and parameters.

See this list of views for details.

"Tabbed browsing"

articy:draft supports something like "tabbed browsing", where each tab 6 contains the "path" 7 of an object in the project structure and the selected view settings 8 that determines how the object shall be presented. For details please go to the tabs page.

Flexible workspace layout

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In addition to the tabs that allow you to access and edit several objects quickly, you can also split your workspace into panes and even have multiple windows. Learn more here.