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a website by Francis Li

DENIM is web site design tool developed at U.C. Berkeley as a follow-up to the SILK project. DENIM allows designers to sketch their web site designs using a computer with a pen, interact with the sketches as if they were real web pages, and then output the sketches into HTML pages. I was not a prinicipal investigator on the DENIM project, but I helped to validate its interaction design.

By designing and interacting with web pages as sketches, the tool supports informal (or low-fidelity) prototyping (Figure 1). I helped to design and administer an experiment comparing web site designs sketched using the DENIM tool with finished, formal (or high-fidelity) prototypes (Figure 2). This preliminary study confirms that sketches are a sufficient representation of web site design such that usability evaluation can be performed on them, while also being faster and easier to generate.

Publications:

• End-User Perceptions of Formal and Informal Representations of Web Sites
  J. I. Hong, F. C. Li, J. Lin, J. A. Landay. In Extended Abstracts of Human Factors in Computing Systems: CHI 2001, Seattle, WA, March 31-April 5, 2001, pp. 385-386.

External sites:

• DENIM and SILK Project Homepage

Figure 1. An informal prototype sketched using DENIM

Figure 2. The corresponding formal prototype design.