December 11th, 2017

Designing Design Tools

Thesis defended on December 11th, 2017.

Jury Members

President: Laurent Grisoni, Professeur des universités, Université de Lille 1
Reviewer: Yannick Prié, Professeur des universités, Université de Nantes
Reviewer: Peter Dalsgaard, Professeur associé, Université d’Aarhus
Examiner: Gillian Crampton-Smith, Professeur Émérite, Univ. de sciences app. de Potsdam
Examiner: Annie Gentes, Maître de Conférences HDR, Télécom Paris-Tech

PhD Advisor: Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Professeur des universités, Université Paris-Sud
co-PhD Advisor: Wendy Mackay, Directrice de Recherche, Inria Saclay

Abstract

Mainstream digital graphic design tools seldom evolved since their creation, more than 25 years ago. In recent years, a growing number of designers started questioning the resulting invisibility of design tools in the design process. In this dissertation, I address the following questions: How do designers work with design software? And how can we design novel design tools that better support designer practices?

Using StoryPortraits, a method designed to capture rich qualitative insight in a form that supports both analysis and design conversations, I first study four designer practices, ranging from specific design operations such as color selection, alignment and distribution, to more complex endeavors such as layout structuring and collaboration with developers. In these empirical studies, I analyze the wealth of designer practices and I characterize the existing mismatch between current digital design tools and designers practices. I show how design tools, because they decouple creativity from tool use, prioritize values such as efficiency and user-friendliness that do not support existing creative practices.

Facing this mismatch, designers need to resort to programming to benefit from the computational power they can't access with traditional tools. Based on my empirical findings, I propose a new type of design tools, Graphical Substrates, that combine the strengths of both programming and traditional Graphical User Interfaces. I design nine different tools that address the needs identified in the four empirical studies by reifying specific user process into Graphical Substrates probes. In four structured observation studies, I show how designers can appropriate these probes in their own terms. For designers to fully benefit from Graphical Substrates, I argue that they need to acknowledge the fundamental design practice of tweaking. I also argue that we should let designers reify their own graphical substrates from specific examples. I design and explore several ways to embed these two mechanisms into Graphical Substrates. In this thesis, I argue that Graphical Substrates open the design space of designers' tools by bridging the gap between programming and graphical user interface to better support the wealth of designers' practices.

Reading the Thesis

The thesis will soon be available online.
In the meantime, the videos of the some of the projects I conducted during my PhD are available.