Informal Tools for Designing Information Architectures

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Informal Tools for Designing Information
Architectures

• James A. Landay, UC Berkeley
• Jack Chen, Katie Everitt, Jason Hong,
• Scott Klemmer, Jimmy Lin, Chris Long,
• Mark Newman, Anoop Sinha,
• Miriam Walker, Sarah Waterson
• _at_ 020202 Dialogue Meeting

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Best Practices for Designing Interfaces

• Iterative design
• Getting it right the first time is hard
• Prototyping tools can be the key to success

Design
Test
Analyze
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Early Stage User Interface Design

• Brainstorming
• put designs in a tangible form
• Incomplete designs
• illustrate important examples
• Sketching other informal representations
  important

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Informal vs. Formal Representations

• Informal visual representation
• communicates unfinished
• encourages creativity
• faster to create

• Formal visual representation
• communicates finished
• inhibits creativity (detailing)
• slower to create

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Informal User Interfaces

• Take advantage of natural input modalities
• speaking
• writing
• gesturing
• sketching
• Minimize recognition of the input
• allow users to work communicate naturally
• document rather than transform

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Informal Prototyping Evaluation Tools
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Investigation into Web DesignInformation
Architecture Comes First

• Interviews w/ 11 professional designers
• Post-Its large surfaces (i.e., affinity
  diagrams)
• haptic UI
• brainstorming
• collaborative
• persistent
• immersive
• hard to share, edit, make digital

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Designers OutpostA Tangible Interface for
Designing Information Architectures

• Combines the physical virtual
• physical post-its, virtual feedback
• Supports existing practice
• affordances of paper
• collaboration
• large, persistent representation
• Adds advantages of e-media
• editing, reuse, distribution
• hand-off later to other tools
• Has an informal user interface
• only recognizes where notes are, not what is on
  them

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Outpost Video
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History Video
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Summary

• Iterative design is the key to good UIs
• Informal tools are the key to iterative design
• We have built several tools to support
• Web Design (Outpost Denim)
• Speech UI Design (SUEDE)
• Multimodal, Cross device UI Design (CrossWeaver)
• Positive results from evaluations community
  reaction

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Informal Tools for Designing Information
Architectures

• Prof. James A. Landay
• EECS Department, UC Berkeley
• http//guir.berkeley.edu