Charrette: Supporting In-Person Discussions around Iterations in User Interface Design

J O'Leary, H Winnemöller, W Li, M Dontcheva… - Proceedings of the …, 2018 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018dl.acm.org
As a rule, user interface designers work iteratively. Over the course of a project, they
repeatedly gather feedback, typically through in-person meetings, and update their designs
accordingly. Through formative work, we find that design software tools do not support
designers in managing meeting notes and previous design iterations as a cohesive whole.
This causes designers to rely on ad-hoc practices for organizing work, which makes it hard
for them to keep track of relevant feedback and explain their design decisions. To address …
As a rule, user interface designers work iteratively. Over the course of a project, they repeatedly gather feedback, typically through in-person meetings, and update their designs accordingly. Through formative work, we find that design software tools do not support designers in managing meeting notes and previous design iterations as a cohesive whole. This causes designers to rely on ad-hoc practices for organizing work, which makes it hard for them to keep track of relevant feedback and explain their design decisions. To address this problem, we present Charrette, a system that allows designers to curate design iterations, attach meeting notes to the relevant content, and navigate sequences of design iterations with the associated notes to facilitate in-person discussions. In an exploratory user study, we evaluate how Charrette affects designers' self-reported ease in handling feedback during face-to-face discussions, compared with using their own tools. We find that using Charrette correlates with increased confidence and recall in discussing previous design decisions.
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