Analysis of “Effect of Fidelity in Diagram Presentation”
Comment Made Elsewhere:
Summary:
This works seeks to contrast when in the design process and presentation of results it is best to “beautify” results, what medium to use, and what level of fidelity (exactness to the ideal in my definition) is appropriate. Hand drawing is quicker and not restrictive, yet looks imcomplete when people might want a cleaned up version for presentation. Different levels of fidelity can also lead an audience to provide different types of feedback (font, color versus content). Essentially hand-drawn is easy for the design stage, but people love to beautify.
Authors created four different levels of fidelity, each time refining strokes to their ideal, including group alignment and handwriting-to-font substitution. For evaluation, then created 25 different conditions based on five different web form setups for the same purpose. Each evaluation participant was then give a low-fidelity (paper) and four higher fidelity (tablet pc) designs to make changes (marked “quality” if inline with design principles, and “expected” if looked for or “other” if not).
Found that more changes were made to the low-fidelity and it linearly decreased as it went on. Same with “quality” changes. However, people still preferred the high-fidelity Tablet PC to the low-fidelity paper.
Discussion:
I like how for their evaluation the first made the designs compliant and then explicited created a certain number of flaws that they could look for as a metric.
Looking at their sample conditions in Figure 1, it just appears first off that there are actually more changes to make on the low-fidelity designs, despite the medium. They comment that alignment and spacing of elements is part of visual fidelity in the opening paragraph of section 7, and it looks that these would at least half of the changes needed (as would be expected by prior works mentioned). These seems to obvious for the researchers to have overlooked, though and I must be missing something. Where alignment and spacing part of their “quality changes”? I would like a table listening some of these.
I also am not of notion that it is a bad thing that one would spend 50% of their time on alignment and spacing since he knows the final version is to be a web form. It’s obivously an important factor to the majority, so a messy design could easliy lead to over-adjusting (i.e. “other changes”). People like the high-fidelity version because most of their work was already done for them.
I do agree, though, that the computer interface is a hinderance no matter what. The user is probably predisposed to feeling that the computer is not capable of doing anything he wanted with the design, so he’s willing to adjust to what it can do. A good example of this escapes me though, so I guess I can’t really back this up. 