HCI:
Sketching

Mick McQuaid

2025-02-18

Week SIX

Today

  • Microinteraction example
  • Figma Tutorial (Ishwari)
  • Q and A from last time
  • Design Critique (Julia Lee)
  • Sketching
  • Norman (2023) ?

Microinteraction example, animate it!

Opening and closing a search dialog box

Discussion

Metaphors beyond visual cues

How can UX designers use metaphors beyond mere visual cues? Mental shortcuts … enriching usability but also promoting sustainable practices …

What does design mean to you?

(a question we have to keep asking ourselves)

Feedback

How can the design team effectively gather and synthesize user feedback?

Validity

Given the subjective nature of user feedback and potential biases inherent in self-report measures, to what extent can the results obtained from such studies be considered reliable and valid?

Top-down design

Can we also say that the initial phase of top down design is not user centered?

(Example: Apple Vision Pro)

Continuous innovation

What are some methods or strategies you could implement to ensure continuous innovation?

Ahead of the wave, yet riding the crest

How can designers innovate to stay ahead of current trends, while ensuring that their technology catches on and becomes mainstream?

Values inherent in top-down and bottom-up design

Would you expect a workspace using a specific approach to hold certain values? If yes, what values do you would you expect?

Drivers of top-down design

The article says ‘Top-down design is heavily driven by domain knowledge’, while I think top-down design is more driven by technology. How do you understand this question?

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

Design is all about constraints.

— Charles Eames

lofi from Buxton (2007)

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)

Norman (2023), Human Behavior

Why change is difficult

  • Changing beliefs takes time: Women’s suffrage took from 1848 to 1920
  • Emotion is as powerful as reason
  • People respond to disasters but don’t prevent them
  • Climate change and pandemics exemplify slowness of response
  • Successful actions often show no visible result

People will mobilize for a common goal

  • People mobilize for war, why not against climate change or pandemics?
  • 44m people believe the US gov’t is secretly controlled by Satanist pedophiles
  • Many people disbelieve scientists and rely on con men
  • These are barriers to change

What must change?

  • Balance between work and family, rooted in the origins of the industrial revolution
  • Changing from a job to an occupation
  • Education: becoming flexible (Don’t Look Up, 2021)
  • Grades for students (switch to pass / fail)
  • Politics (book was written in 2023)
  • Reward structures (industry and academia have bad ones)

Dominance of technology

  • Treating people as servants of machines
  • Tech-centered approach treats human virtues as deficits
  • Focus, curiosity, mind wandering, mental addiction

Future of technology

  • It’s hard to predict things, especially the future (Yogi Berra)
  • Miniaturization
  • Energy
  • Biotech
  • Money
  • Intelligence Amplification

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

Project 2

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.
Norman, Donald A. 2023. Design for a Better World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

END

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