A Methodological Framework for Multi-Fidelity Sketching of User Interfaces

Designing the right User Interface (UI) of an Information System the first time is very unlikely to occur. Instead, UI design is recognized as a process that remains intrinsically open, iterative, and incomplete. Most designers consider hand sketches on paper as one of the most effective means to represent the first drafts of a future UI. This kind of unconstrained approach presents many advantages: sketches can be drawn at any time, it is fast to learn and quick to produce, it lets the sketcher focus on basic structural issues instead of unimportant details, and it encourages creativity. The idea of developing a computer-based tool for sketching UIs naturally emerged from these observations. Such a tool would extend the advantages provided by sketching techniques by: easy creating, deleting, updating or moving of UI elements, thus encouraging typical activities in the design process such as exploratory design, checking and revision. In this thesis, we introduce SketchiXML, a multi-platform interactive application that enable designers and end users to sketch user interfaces with different levels of fidelity and support for different contexts of use. The results of the sketching are analyzed to produce interface specifications independently of any context. These specifications are exploited to progressively produce one or several interfaces, for several contexts of use. Moreover, this tool is integrated in a complete prototyping solution that can provide effective support to most software development methodologies.