"User Sketches: A Quick, Inexpensive, and Effective way to Elicit More Reflective User Feedback"

by M. Tohidi, W. Buxton, R. Baecker, A. Sellen

Summary

Usability testing (UT) is well-known and commonly used to involve users in various stages of the design process. But in current UT process, participants generate significantly more reactive comments and criticisms than reflective design suggestions or redesign proposals. So user sketching is proposed to provide the right means for generating reflective feedback, without adding significantly to the cost and without eliminating the active involvement of users in the process.

Iterative process between sketch and knowledge/mind allows for an increasing improvement of the sketch/design. It provides users with a richer medium for communicating their feedback to designers. The work has taken place in two stages.

In their first study, they examined the differences that would result between a usability test that exposed users to a single design, versus one where they tried three different alternatives. The product was a touch-sensitive House Climate Control System. Three distinctive prototypes were developed, each reflecting a different design language: Circular, Tabular, and Linear. All three were consistent in terms of fidelity, functionality and quality. Think-aloud protocol and interview give much less reflective feedback than reactive feedback. Participants lack confidence in their own redesign suggestions. The process of thinking and verbalizing one's thoughts at the same time is very distracting.

Then in the second stage of the study, participants were asked to redesign the system. The results suggests that the less the original design is reflected in the user sketches, the less successful it is, and the sketches from the multiple design condition were richer in variation from any of the original designs compared with those from the three single conditions. Being able to recognize patterns at a glance, or answering unanticipated questions are unique benefits of sketches over numeric, textual, audio and video data. Sketching is a cheap and efficient way to enable the participants to refine already generated ideas and discover new ones.

Then three examples are given to illustrate a number of ways in which sketching helped the participants to better organize their thoughts, come up with new and unexpected design ideas, reflect on and refine previously stated ideas, and communicate their ideas to the experimenters.


Discussion

This paper illustrates the idea of applying sketching in UT. From the sketch recognition respect of view, I think it quite inspiring. The approach of paper-based sketching can totally be replaced by sketch recognition in the future.

The sentence "It is when sketches are seen in a larger group that patterns emerge and relationships are discovered." in Discussion suggests that we can use sketch recognition to abstract patterns from multiple sketches drawn by users. And this will be a major advantage of sketch recognition to paper-based sketching in UT process.

Another sentence in the Future Work part "one of our longer term objectives is to explore such techniques further in ideation, especially when comparing multiple design alternatives." gives us the picture that how sketch recognition can facilitate design. For example, the elements in multiple design alternatives can be abstracted and recombined in other forms to generage new design, or the users can give reflective feedback by just modifying the original design with sketch recognition instead of drawing their own from the beginning...

some videos:
UML design http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3-ozq-ZbHE
LADDER GUI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjwdpB0Y924
GUI design http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVrw1Wgdfg