Prototyping Digital, Physical, and Mixed User Interfaces by Sketching
Jean Vanderdonckt
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Abstract
Sketching digital and physical user interfaces present many benefits such as naturalness, intuitiveness, ability to elicit user requirements, and ability to discover usability problems. These advantages are confirmed in MIXEDSKETCH, a software for prototyping any type of user interface by sketching: a digital interface such as a graphical user interface, a physical interface such as a tangible user interface, and, more uniquely, mixed user interfaces that combine elements from both digital and physical worlds, simultaneously or at different design stages. As the development process proceeds from early design to detailed development, MIXEDSKETCH ensures a smooth transition from a low fidelity representation to a high-level representation of the UI being sketched through mid-fidelity. In the last stage, a precise presentation and a dialog can be sketched that automatically generate a description of the future interface for one or multiple toolkits. In addition, MIXEDSKETCH enables the designer to transform a digital, a physical, or a mixed user interface in a counterpart in another world, e.g. moving from digital to physical to mixed.
Key takeaways
- UI design by sketching has already demonstrated several advantages: UI sketching is preferred over traditional interface builders, especially by end users [11,16], it can be performed at different levels of fidelity without loosing advantages [17,26], the amount of usability problems discovered through a sketched design is not inferior to those corresponding to a genuine UI [26], the expressive power of a sketched UI remains the same [27], a sketched UI provides quantitative and qualitative results that are comparable to traditional UI prototypes except that the cost is reduced [18], UI sketching encourages exploratory design and fosters communication between stakeholders more than any other prototypes [22], flexibility is superior to UI builders [27], authoring tools [1], and paper prototypes [27].
- The UI prototype fidelity is said to be high if the prototype representation is the closest possible to the final UI, or almost in the same representation (based on [16]).
- Thanks to the object recognition process, the designer can input any UI object in any level of fidelity and see the result in any other level as the interpretation is immediate.
- If a UI element has not been recognized, it is simply kept as it is.
- Therefore, not only it is possible to sketch a digital or physical UI at different levels of fidelity, but it is always possible to switch from one world to another and immediately see the corresponding UI in the other world.
