User Sketches

Tohidi, Buxton, Baecker, Sellen

COMMENTS

1. Comment on Daniel's Blog

SUMMARY

This paper aims to present a sketching technique which will encourage more reflective as opposed to reactive feedback from the user during Usability Testing(UT). Traditionally, techniques like questionnaires, think-aloud, interviews have been used in UT. But these techniques elicit more of criticism and problem identification from the user. The users are unable to provide any solutions in terms of alternative design ideas. The author proposes an inexpensive technique called user-sketching to get reflective feedback. The authors conducted two studies to explore their idea further. The first study consisted of examining the differences between two ways of performing a UT for a House Climate Control System (HCCS). The second study was performed at the end of the UT when users were asked to sketch an idea of what would be a better interface design. The authors notices that verbal feedback from interviews only consisted of pointing out shortcomings of the system. The users could not organize their thoughts properly when asked for suggestions. However when asked to sketch users came up with completely new ideas, some of them similar to the three example prototypes (which they had not seen). The authors then counted the number of ideas generated by user-sketching and also the number of ideas that were generated in the traditional methods but not in the sketching exercise. The authors found the percentage of the latter to be small.
This technique thus provides a less expensive way to reinforce the existing UT techniques. The author's future work will involve the study of role of such techniques further in the ideation process.

DISCUSSION

In the paper author substantiates his claim that sketching (on paper) leads to more reflective feedback with an elaborate experiment. By quoting excerpts from the interviews, the paper gives us an important insight into how sketching could lead to more creative process which is otherwise hindered with traditional UT techniques. However in the context of sketch recognition, it remains to be seen how recognition will help in such a process.