End-user perceptions of formal and informal representations of web sites

ABSTRACT

Web site designers have expressed concerns that formal, cleaned-up representations of early ideas cause end-users to focus on inappropriate details. It is believed that the high-fidelity of formal representations cause end-users to believe a design is more complete and therefore not amenable to high-level changes and suggestions. In this paper we present an experiment comparing end-user perceptions of formal and informal electronic representations of web site designs. We found that end-users do in fact believe formal representations are finished and unchanging, but that this does not seem to influence the level of detail in their suggestions. However, it appears that informal designs presented in an electronic medium raises user expectations such that lower-level suggestions about the visual aspects were made.

REFERENCES

• 1: Landay, J. A., Interactive Sketching for the Early Stages of User Interface Design. Technical Report CMU-CS-96-201, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 1996.
• 2: James Lin , Mark W. Newman , Jason I. Hong , James A. Landay, DENIM: finding a tighter fit between tools and practice for Web site design, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.510-517, April 01-06, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/332040.332486]
• 3: Mark W. Newman , James A. Landay, Sitemaps, storyboards, and specifications: a sketch of Web site design practice, Proceedings of the conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, p.263-274, August 17-19, 2000, New York City, New York, United States [doi>10.1145/347642.347758]
• 4: Yin Yin Wong, Rough and ready prototypes: lessons from graphic design, Posters and short talks of the 1992 SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, May 03-07, 1992, Monterey, California [doi>10.1145/1125021.1125094]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human information processing

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods
          Subjects: Representations (procedural and rule-based)

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
formal, informal, prototyping, sketching, web design