Reflection on Dow, S. P., Glassco, A., Kass, J., Schwarz, M., Schwartz, D. L., & Klemmer, S. R. (2010). Parallel prototyping leads to better design results, more divergence, and increased self-efficacy. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 17(4), 18.
Summary:
The paper presents a controlled experiment where participants created online advertisement banners under two different conditions: (1) serial condition where the participants submitted a draft design and received feedback, and then iterated over it, and (2) parallel condition where the participants created multiple drafts before receiving feedback. The parallel condition outperformed serial condition in terms of diversity, click through rates, expert ratings, and in enabling greater self-efficacy among participants.
My reflection:
I am amazed by the work in this paper, particularly to control the variabilities in the experiment. I felt they were clever in selecting advertisements design as a design task, and that too using a fixed design tool. I felt reading the conclusion that using click-through rates and controlling the number of impressions, which is fairly common these days, was a novelty back then. Irrespective of that, the proxy measure was an effective way to measure the outcome of the experimental conditions.
Furthermore, preparing 50 critiques statements beforehand was another brilliant move. The critiquing system may feel reductive, but this way, the researchers effectively controlled the variance that may arise due to subjective feedback. This helps make their claim stronger.
The paper makes no claim about creativity but talks about enabling diverse ideas in design. They argue that parallel prototyping may help designers explore the design space more. The quantitative data suggests that parallel condition enabled more divergent content and they also provide qualitative feedback from the participant that it did help them. This leads me to think that maybe I should follow the author’s suggestion in my own practice. When I iterate over design (e.g. wireframe, storyboards), it is mostly done serially (mostly with my advisor giving feedback). The paper has convinced me to try parallel prototyping next time around.
One thing that is not clear to me is how much time each participant spent on the design. Did the parallel condition participants spend the same amount of time to create 3 prototypes as the serial condition participant spend in creating 1? Or did the serial participants know that they have to do multiple iterations multiple times so spend less time on each iteration? Time on task may be something that we have to look carefully.
Leaving aside the content of the paper, I think the greatest idea about creativity that I felt was from the domain of work exemplified by the paper. I was intrigued by the work and its overarching goal: of fundamentally changing the way we do prototyping. That’s a huge argument! The fact that they do it so elegantly and with such simple experiments has left me amazed. I wish I could come up with simple experiments to change fundamental ways in which we do things. The experiments may be simple, but the thought process that lead to those experiments are certainly not!