Where Do Web Sites Come From? Capturing and Interacting with Design History
Scott R. Klemmer, Michael Thomsen, Ethan Phelps-Goodman, Robert Lee, and James A. Landay. 2002. Where do web sites come from?: capturing and interacting with design history. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’02). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-8. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/503376.503378
Summary:
In this paper, the author aimed at forming a deep understanding of the present. Hence, finding and engaging history is one of the most important tasks. Then, this paper presented an informal history capture and retrieval mechanism for collaborative and early-stage information design. The author implemented a branched history, presenting the current branch to the user as a linear history. And users can simply jump to any point on the timeline. In the timeline visualization, the author tried filtering thumbnails, timeline navigation, branched time visualization, and local timeline visualization to provide better user experience. In the history usage scenarios, the author designed several different scenarios, reaching a dead-end, writing a session summary, find the rationale behind a decision and following up on a session. After the design study and based on the reflection from professional web site designers, they were excited about the functionality with the exception of garish interactions and encouraging them to make calmer interactions as the default. This result showed that this history system could actually help web site designer a lot and enhance the productivity of their working in the future.
Reflection：
The two important insights after interviewing several professional web site designers are interesting. First, designers create many different intermediate representations of a web site. Second designers expressed a desire to have a unified way to manage different variations of design ideas. I think both of these two insights could lead us to how to design in the future about the history system.
About the filtering thumbnails, I am kind of interested in this thumbnails. The activity filters and inferred filters are two great designs. Each of them could give users different visualization based on their own preferences. I think that these advanced filters could make this history system more flexible, and this is, of course, one important factor for webs site designers.
Also, the branched time visualization is a great idea. It could show us our past actions even we deleted them or undo them. Preserving the entire history is kind of paramount for users to check their past activities even they were removed. It likes an old version which we discarded. But in the future, we may still need to check these “useless” actions for some reasons. I think the history system should do like this, recording all the things, removed or not.
Discuss:
After reading this paper, I am wondering that finding more participants, instead of only professional web site designers, to do the design study would be better. Because in the design industry, there is not only a web site designer. As user interface designers, advertisement designers would also be great choices.
To be honest, these post-it notes visualization could be kind of small, I think. Sometimes, users could not get useful information from these small images, even though people are surely familiar with these sticks.