User Sketches: A Quick, Inexpensive, and Effective way to Elicit More Reflective User Feedback

Maryam Tohidi, William Buxton, Ronald Baecker, and Abigail Sellen

Summary

Usability testing typically involves interacting with potential users of a system through verbal communications and visual observations. The authors of this work noticed that the type of feedback received using standard usability techniques was often more reactive than reflective. Participants report more criticisms than actual suggestions and improvements. To resolve this issues, the authors looked to incorporate sketches as usability feedback metric. The authors ran a traditional usability study comparing designs for a thermostat. At the end of the study, participants were asked to draw their own design for a thermostat. The authors noticed that the sketches pointed out the same issues as the more traditional methods, but also, introduced more suggestive feedback. Participants' sketches contained new ideas or combined ideas from the designs shown earlier in the study.

Discussion

The authors introduce a new quick and inexpensive way to collect feedback in a usability study. By allowing participants to sketch out ideas, they are better able to think about and convey design suggestions than through verbal and textual means. I think this is a great idea. Communicating issues with visual designs is sometimes better reflected through drawing.

One thing I would suggest in terms of this research is to not only allow users to create their own design, but also to sketch changes to an existing design when using the more traditional usability techniques. Participants in these studies are not experts on UI design. They often may not understand restrictions placed on the design. However, that is not to say that their new designs cannot benefit, just that, new ideas may not solve existing issues and may not be practical.

This work does not directly deal with sketch recognition; however, the use of sketch recognition techniques to help in evaluating participant sketches seems useful. Allowing a computer the computer to compute quantitative results can reduce even further the small time already demanded by this approach.