Ugo Braga Sangiorgi

User interface design by collaborative sketching

User interface design consists of a collaborative activity where various stakeholders can all sketch the future interactive system at different levels of fidelity on different devices and computing platforms. User interfaces sketches are also intended to support prototypes on multiple computing platforms and operating systems that all impose their own capabilities and constraints. In order to support the needs for user interface design by sketching, this paper describes Gambit, a multi-platform system that provides a light-weight approach for prototyping graphical user interfaces by sketching with HTML5. The paper reports on an experiment for the most preferred platform/devices for three primary sketching functions by designers and developers in a Gambit-supported session.

GAMBIT: Addressing multi-platform collaborative sketching with html5

Prototypes are essential tools for design activities for they allow designers to realize and evaluate ideas in early stages of the development. Sketching is a primary tool for constructing prototypes of interactive systems and has been used in developing low-fidelity prototypes for a long time. The computational support for sketching has been receiving a recurrence of interest in the last 45 years and again nowadays within the mobile web context, where there are diverse devices to be considered. The research reported on this paper aims at addressing issues on multi-platform collaborative sketching using a prototyping tool for user interfaces. The tool was built to aid the investigation on how designers sketch using many different devices and collaborate using their sketches during design sessions.

Assessing lag perception in electronic sketching

Electronic sketching has received a recurrence of interest over the years and again nowadays within the mobile web context, where there are diverse devices, operating systems and browsers to be considered. Multi-platform (e.g. web-based) sketching systems can be constructed to allow users to sketch on their device of preference. However, web applications do not always perform equally on all devices, and this is a critical issue, especially for applications that require instant visual feedback such as sketch-based systems. This paper describes a user study conducted to identify the most appropriate response rates (expressed in frames per second) for end users while sketching. The results are expected to guide stakeholders in defining response parameters for sketching applications on the web by showing intervals that are accepted, tolerated, and rejected by end users.

QualiHM: A requirement engineering toolkit for efficient user interface design

An effective User Interface (UI) is a key success factor for interactive systems. Hence, particular attention should be paid to the UI design during the Requirement Engineering process (RE). Several RE tools have been proposed in order to support the UI design. However, these tools have limitations in terms of requirements completeness, requirements quality analysis and UI generation from requirements. In this paper, we present a new RE toolkit called QualIHM, that deals with the limitations of the existing RE. The toolkit supports the description of requirements in different formats. In addition, QualiHM facilitates the UI design by transforming requirement formats from one to another, generating the UI code and providing feedback about the aesthetic of the UI.

Electronic sketching on a multi-platform context: A pilot study with developers

During the past 45 years there has been a recurrence of interest on supporting sketching at electronic devices and interactive surfaces, and despite being sketching recognition fairly well addressed on the literature, the adoption of electronic sketching as a design tool is still a challenge. The current popularization of touch screen devices allows designers to sketch using their device of preference, while the current multi-platform capabilities made possible by HTML5 allows sketching systems to run on many devices at the same time. Those two factors combined might pose new opportunities for researchers to explore how designers use sketching on flexible setups by combining heterogeneous sketching devices for design sessions. This may arise new possibilities in the field of prototyping user interfaces since, by using such multi-platform systems, designers would now be able of designing interfaces for multiple devices by producing and testing them on the device itself. This paper reports a pilot experiment conducted with 6 developers, grouped into pairs on design sessions using Gambit - a multi-platform sketching system that provides a lightweight approach for prototyping user interfaces for many devices at once. We performed a discourse analysis of the professionals based on recorded videos of interviews conducted during and after design sessions with the system and aggregated the data in order to investigate the main requirements for multi-platform sketching systems.

ECOVAL: A Framework for Increasing the Ecological Validity in Usability Testing

The term ecological validity refers to the study of the measurable correspondence between experimental design and ecological setting (i.e., Representative users performing real tasks in their natural environment). Therefore, it is important to anyone intending to generalize the conclusions from the particular circumstances of an experiment to wider ecological situations. However, there is no operational definition that enables to objectively quantify the ecological validity of an experimental design. The ECOVAL framework offers a formal starting point to bridge this gap by helping to both define and increase the ecological validity in usability testing. A methodology, a tool and guidelines to increase ecological validity are presented in an industrial case study. The return on investment of increasing ecological validity is examined in terms of user efficiencies and usability practice. Finally, recommendations to increase ecological validity are introduced, contributions discussed, and outlines for future work presented.

Enhancing collaborative sketching activities with context-aware adaptation guidelines

Designing interactive systems for multiple contexts of use becomes a burden when the end user interaction takes place in distinct scenarios whose specific characteristics and constraints vary and must be carefully considered. Stakeholders face then two main challenges: they are not aware of what among several context information is significantly relevant to consider, or how to appropriately adapt the user interfaces according to the information considered. Furthermore, stakeholders cannot simply rely on existing UI editors once they usually do not provide enough support for adaptation. Thus, adaptation is often ignored, resulting in user interfaces that are only suitable for static and conventional contexts of use. To support the design of user interfaces that are properly adapted to their target context, this paper proposes a novel methodology to enhance sketching activities by proposing to the end user context-aware adaptation guidelines. This work aims at raising awareness about context-aware adaptation since the early stages of the UI design.

Addressing multi-platform collaborative sketching

Prototypes are essential tools for design activities for they allow designers to realize and evaluate ideas in early stages of the development. Sketching is a primary tool for constructing prototypes of interactive systems and has been used in developing low-fidelity prototypes for a long time. The computational support for sketching has been receiving a recurrence of interest in the last 45 years and again nowadays within the mobile web context, where there are diverse devices to be considered. The research reported on this paper aims at addressing issues on multi-platform collaborative sketching using a prototyping tool for user interfaces. The tool was built to aid the investigation on how designers sketch using many different devices and collaborate using their sketches during design sessions.