UC Irvine

This thesis presents a prototype sketching tool designed to address the problem of reusing sketches. Our goal is to help designers preserve, understand, and communicate meaning that is represented in groups of sketches. To this end, we introduce workspaces, which provide an interface for arranging and annotating groups of sketches in flexible configurations. We also provide new sketch metadata, a navigation interface, and filtering capabilities to assist designers in locating sketches of interest.

To evaluate this prototype, we conducted a small user study. Eight participants working in development roles at a local business were recruited for this study. Participants worked individually through a set of tasks using our prototype, while we observed whether and how they used the tool’s various features. We interviewed each participant upon completion of the tasks to gather more data about their experience.

Based on our observations of the participants as well as their feedback, we determined several important findings. We believe that workspaces represent an important step toward helping designers visualize, understand, and explain groups of sketches and the design stories they embody, and that the prototype succeeds in making it easier to locate sketches of interest. Additionally, we identified several feature enhancements that would make the tool even more useful.