Human Computer Interaction:
Sketching

Mick McQuaid

2/16/23

Week FIVE

Today

• Q and A from last time
• Discussion leading (Ty Chaney)
• Design Critique (Siyu Chen)
• Article Presentation (Kali Foyle)
• Break (break may be earlier or later in sequence)
• Discussion leading (Swaraj Saha)
• Article Presentation (Nimra Ishfaq)
• Sketching
• Readings

Q and A from last time

Learning (1 of 2)

• Surveys allow you to gather information from many more people than would be practical in other methods.
• In today’s class, for sara, I was impressed by the design for blind people, and I think we can go deeper into the design needed by users with different needs
• Interviewing, including many other methods in user research, is a skill that is developed and strengthened over time. It’s not something you can just read about and be great at.

Learning (2 of 2)

• The formal names for all the methods of interviews. I also really liked learning more about affinity mapping.
• Contextual Inquiry, affinity mapping, and how to perform those
• It was helpful to go through the data elicitation process in class. From one of the discussions in class - ‘Observing Sara’ case study caught my attention and it was an interesting read. The rationale behind the benefits of a one person study was something I’ve come across for the first time.

Questions (1 of 2)

Is user research the same as UX research?

This is an important question because terminology is in flux. I don’t know the definitive answer to this question and I suspect that there is not a definitive answer. People use different terms to mean the same thing and the same term to mean different things! And people are changing their terminology all the time. Let’s ask the class. The related question we can ask is whether we can understand user experience or should understand user experience without understanding the user.

Questions (2 of 2)

Which is the best research method to use when a design team is pressed for time?

My opinion is that contextual inquiry is the best research method in this case, provided that two criteria are met: (1) the work process is not exotic, and (2) the potential users are receptive to change.

Sketching

typical user-centered design stages

1. Contextual Inquiry (also known as user research)
2. Personas (also known as modeling)
3. Scenarios (also known as storyboarding)
4. Lofi Prototypes (also known as sketches—our subject today)
5. Hifi Prototypes (I include midfi in this category)
6. Handoff to developers

Here is an example of how a design team might work. There might be frequent communications with the developers, but ultimately there is usually a handoff of a hifi design to developers. By the time we hand this design off, we’ve done several things. We’ve researched the situation of users at work (or perhaps at play). We’ve used the output of that research to create personas to serve with our design. We’ve injected these personas into scenarios where they use our design successfully. Then comes the fun part. We brainstorm or ideate several solutions that would fit into the scenarios. These usually take the form of sketches. The heart of design is choosing between these sketches for further refinement. The hifi prototype is this refinement and it may go through many iterations.

Design is all about constraints.

— Charles Eames

Eames, half of the famous husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames, said this in an interview. After the interviewer asked him to elaborate, he replied “Aren’t constraints enough?” This speaks volumes about the difference between design and art, which is relatively unencumbered by the constraints clients place on design.

lofi from Buxton (2007)

The “conversation” is between the sketch (right bubble) and the mind (left bubble). A sketch is created from current knowledge (top arrow). Reading, or interpreting the resulting representation (bottom arrow), creates new knowledge. The creation results from what Goldschmidt (1991) calls “seeing that” reasoning, and the extraction of new knowledge results from what she calls “seeing as.”

Goldschmidt gives an example where an architect named Glenda, sketches some squares: Glenda sees that the squares could be treated as basic elements. The square configuration could be seen as a puzzle. She sees that this metaphor leads nowhere. She tries another metaphor: seeing the square pattern as a casbah. She sees that in a casbah there are confined territories.

In this short passage the designer alternates her reasoning modality with every argument she makes.

My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.

— James Thurber

Sketching capabilities from Buxton (2007)

lofi and hifi from Buxton (2007)

Sketchbook pages exhibited in Buxton (2007), pp 194–5

Readings

Readings last week include Hartson and Pyla (2019): Ch 9, 10

Readings this week include Hartson and Pyla (2019): Ch 12, 13, 14

Assignments

none

References

Buxton, Bill. 2007. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Goldschmidt, G. 1991. “The Dialectics of Sketching.” Creativity Research Journal 4 (2): 123–43.

Hartson, Rex, and Pardha Pyla. 2019. The UX Book, 2nd Edition. Cambridge, MA: Morgan Kaufman.

END

Colophon

This slideshow was produced using quarto

Fonts are League Gothic and Lato