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Abstract:

Most CHI research on the early phases of design focuses on creative design process. It is important to support creativity, but the research thus far has missed two important elements of interface design. First, most interface design is really quite mundane. People need a search interface or a way to choose from a list of options, etc. These normal, everyday, features dominate the design of interfaces in most application development efforts. The second is that creativity does not start from scratch. Ideas do not come out of the clear blue sky, but are instead based on prior experiences and reasoning by analogy [1]. My position is therefore that support is needed for applying alternative design ideas early in the design process. Sketching interfaces and other approaches can be effective at expressing and exploring early design ideas [2, 3], but have yet to integrate how previous solutions to similar problems can be brought to bear on the problem. One needs to be able to answer the question “What other systems have had similar requirements, and what were their solutions? ” The answer to such a question should not only provide potential solutions, but help shape evolving requirements, which tend to be particularly volatile in early stages of design. In what follows, I describe a system we have been developing at the University of Nebraska to support the use of design guidelines and patterns in the software design and development process. This work has not focused particularly on early design stages, but I feel strongly that it has the potential to have an impact and augment current sketch-based tools and approaches. I hope to explore this conjecture further at the workshop.

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