The Design Room And Whiteboard Metaphor

In corporate project settings, stakeholders usually share one or more rooms. It is quite common to use this kind of room for organizational discussions as well as for brainstorming and problem-solving. Because of the variety of purposes such a room can have, it is often called a „design room‟. Some shared workspaces are also called

„war rooms‟, because stakeholders use these rooms for facing trade-off dilemmas and making difficult design decisions. Such rooms can significantly facilitate com-munication and collaboration between stakeholders, which is of the utmost impor-tance for corporate UI specification teams (see Table 69). Design rooms (see Figure 91), such as described by (Karat & Bennett 1990), are the “public memory and con-science” (Beyer & Holtzblatt 1997), p. 204 of the team and provide an environment that allows discussion and the exploring of ideas. The walls of the room serve as a repository for all design artefacts. The visitor to the room can easily discover the de-tails of the existing artefacts or gain an overview of all documents. If artefacts are hand-drawn, they can be easily exchanged with new documents quickly created dur-ing design sessions. For example, rapid UI storyboarddur-ing can take place in this way Design and war rooms

of the important documents. As with the design room, different stakeholders should be able to access this space in order to look at, discuss and change the artefacts it stores. Because the artefacts are maintained during the whole UI specification life-cycle, the design room increases the traceability between models and designs. By drawing associations between artefacts pinned on the wall, different documents be-come related to each other. Compared to small desktop work places, the zoomable design room enables the visualization and comparison of all relevant data.

“Writing ideas on the wall is a way of interacting with the data. It provides a way to capture design ideas so that the design team can act on them, and everyone can feel they contributed something to the design. Posting ideas clears people‟s heads to go on to something new or to build an idea up into something larger.” (Beyer & Holtz-blatt 1997), p. 202

Figure 91: A design room; from (Geyer 2008) based on (Preece et al. 1994)

Naturally, in applying the design room as a metaphor for a UI specification tool, the challenges of this approach must also be considered. The number of artefacts that can potentially be pinned up on the wall must not overwhelm stakeholders. In a real-world setting, the team will usually try to cluster and manage the artefacts. An electronic counterpart of a design room must also provide means for structuring and filtering the specification space, for example in order to enable a focus on aspects relevant at a particular point in time.

In IxD, the fundamental idea of metaphors is to transport concepts from the real world to the world of the computer. This includes the mapping of the way humans think (Benyon et al. 2005) about interaction concepts in the electronic world. In in-teracting with the UI of an application on a computer, the human user can refer to concepts known from the real world if the metaphor is adequately chosen. Then, the UI metaphor supports the user in developing a mental model of the system. If the re-sponse of the system to the user‟s action accords with the expectations inferred from the metaphor, the user is likely to learn the software application more easily. In prac-tice, operating systems and complex software applications often employ several metaphors to decrease the threshold of using and understanding their functionality and purpose (Preim 1999). Combinations of several metaphors are feasible, but must not lead to artificial or arbitrary expressions of UI behaviour (Cooper et al. 2007).

Ultimately, a successful metaphor combines characteristics from the real world and characteristics from the interactive system. For example, the design room can have much more functionality as a computer-supported application, because there are no physical limitations and the UI specification space is infinite. Even if the metaphor is indeed used for a UI specification tool, it is still acceptable to talk about a design room (albeit an electronic one). It is, however, important not to try to copy the real room without any loss or adaptation (Hudson 2000). This means that the UI of a specification tool does not need to present the virtual design room in terms of walls, pins and artefacts. The concept of this tool support should concentrate more on the

Issues with metaphors

basic idea of allocating artefacts in a large specification space, allowing different stakeholders to access and manipulate the embedded information.

For the conceptual model of a UI specification tool that addresses the require-ments outlined in Table 69, the combination of the design room metaphor with a whiteboard metaphor is obligatory. Whiteboards are a frequently used medium for collaboration and rapid prototyping of concepts and designs. Whiteboards are widely applied in agile processes and also as the basis for sketching and sketch-based tools as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. The whiteboard promotes creative thinking, as it provides an informal space for collecting and expressing design ideas.

“While the focus of the design process lies in the creation, manipulation and rela-tion of artefacts on the whiteboard, collaborative features of the room metaphor may also turn out helpful in physical design. The whiteboard metaphor primarily of-fers features that support a creative design process. Its whiteboard features effi-ciently facilitate informal means of expression […].” (Geyer 2008), p. 70

Due to the nature of real whiteboards, the metaphor must break physical borders to add value to the activities of UI specification. Normal whiteboards just provide some limited features for arranging and relating different artefacts. Accordingly, frequent changes to elements of the whiteboard might cause many changes and much rework. A computer-supported whiteboard can ease the process of relating and linking artefacts, as well as maintaining different versions of artefacts. This eases the comparison of design alternatives and provides much better support for keeping track of changes and interdependencies between models and UI design. Having unlimited space enables the user to draw gigantic diagrams and designs.

“If you are using a real whiteboard, you may go up to a diagram on the board and say „I think that should go there‟. As you say the words „that‟ and „there‟, you point at the relevant parts of the diagram. This is called deictic reference or simply deixis.”(Dix et al. 2003), p. 682)

In summary, the design-room metaphor, in combination with the whiteboard metaphor, also addresses demands for interdisciplinary stakeholder collaboration.

Both of these electronic metaphoric concepts function as shared spaces, and stake-holders can discuss different artefacts. Interdisciplinary communication is therefore supported by a shared deixis between actors (Dix et al. 2003). The deixis depends on shared artefacts for this communication (see Figure 92). The artefacts can support communication in terms of underlining verbal arguments or by being the vehicle of communication themselves.

Combining design room and white-board metaphor

Computer-supported whiteboards in UI specification

Design room and whiteboard hand-in-hand

“As actors control and manipulate artefacts, others may observe these actions and respond with feedback.”(Geyer 2008), p. 91

With linking and association features, users of a tool designed in this way are able to easily navigate between artefacts spread over a huge UI specification space, i.e. the design room. Interrelated artefacts thus provide a means for tracing require-ments and understanding the design rationale due to more transparency. Different aspects of interest can be clustered and, on demand, the content is moved into the focus of those stakeholders discussing or working on the issue. Creating or changing artefacts then brings in the whiteboard metaphor, because the manipulation of arte-facts in the virtual design room takes place using the work style known from the whiteboard, namely wide freedom of creativity and unconstrained means for dia-grammatic modelling and UI prototyping.

“So different representations allow us to see different things about a design. Fur-thermore different kinds of formal representation can allow yet more views on the artefact during design.” (Dix 2003), p. 6 (437)