reg:exp

HCI Comments VII

Thoughts on:
DENIM: An Informal Web Site Design Tool Inspired by Observations of Practice, Mark W. Newman, James Lin, Jason I. Hong, James A. Landay, Human-Computer Interaction, 2003. 18(3): pp. 259-324

Newman et al. show how fieldwork can play an important part in the UI design cycle. Their initial user study suggested the lack of tools for the early stages of website design. Consequently, the authors abandoned their original plan to design software for finished websites and refocused on developing an information organization tool that supports the early sketching phase of website design. Unwittingly, they further underline the importance of user-centered development in their implementation of "semantic zoom" levels within DENIM: three representation levels were suggested by the initial user study; two more were added ad-hoc by the programmers. The latter two levels then turned out to be of little use to practitioners during the reported evaluation study. Most insightful quote on this topic (pg. 317): "Much of [web design practice] literature is prescriptive rather than descriptive in nature and may not accurately reflect what designers are actually doing in the field. To learn what designers do, there is no substitute for direct connect."

Curiously, a discussion of data-driven, dynamic websites was absent from the otherwise very thorough and detailed article. In my own experience as a web designer and programmer, most sites have long moved from static HTML to database/CMS-backed, script-driven dynamic output. In this programming-heavy model, sub-page-level code modules are used as basic building blocks - logic widgets that often get reused in multiple different pages. DENIM focuses solely on surface realization of pages and does not address this underlying information infrastructure.

The authors write that "several designers were interested in having a tool that helped them keep track of project histories." This statement suggests an unfortunate disconnect between the realms of web design and general computer programming. The computer science community has long relied on freely available version control tools such as CVS. These systems readily work for HTML pages; given enough interest, it should also be possible to develop an extension for performing version comparisons on images - "visual diffs".

A major shortcoming of the DENIM system is the lack of downstream integration into the further production pipeline. The notion of "semantic zoom" should be carried through to its conclusion. Finished site sketches apparently have to be reprogrammed from scratch for final production - GIF image-map exports are not very useful to work off.

Finally, it seems to me that the custom set of pen gesture commands developed for DENIM would hinder rather than help its adoption. Web designers have to learn a new list of UI commands that are only useful within one application. This is possibly a general problem of pen-based interfaces where standards are still lacking or inherently difficult to define across applications (cf. Ken Hinckley's CS547 talk from last week).