Designers and non-designers alike often describe fabric in ways that are markedly different or unclear. For example, two designers might attribute qualities such as ``heavy'' to a material, but actually mean completely different things, despite using the same words. This ambiguity in description becomes more prominent when the designer has to make sense of the fabric remotely, such as shopping online.
This ambiguity in description presets an opportunity to study user interface design that supports, rather than diminishes, the role of ambiguity, which is often a resource in design domains. Our most important research question was: How can we design interfaces with standard interface toolkits to help designers explore and understand material remotely?
For our approach, we studied how people described distinct fabrics, from experts, novices, to everyday people and the crowdsourcing community on how they interpret fabrics. We applied that information to designs that communicated materiality and ambiguity in various ways, and studied how interfaces affected a user's process of exploring materials and negotiating the meaning of materiality.
The most important findings are user interface guidelines that apply to designing technology any domain focused on description and ambiguity, such as design domains. Such design guidelines include: (1) the importance to communicate distinctions between description and category, (2) The role of ambiguity in design, while well-supported in the literature, is a value not shared among all practitioners, and (3) a better understanding of the different ways users negotiate with description and make sense of material remotely. / Ph. D. / When presented with a fabric, even experienced designers tend to describe it in very different, often unclear, ways. For example, two designers describing the denim in a pair of jeans might refer to it as thick. However, they could be talking about completely different properties – one might be referring to the thread count of the fabric while another could be referring to the general feel. This ambiguity in description becomes more prominent when the designer cannot touch a fabric directly, such as when shopping online.
This problem inspired us to better understand how people describe fabric, so that we could design user interfaces that focus on these kinds of ambiguous situations. We began by studying how people interpreted distinct fabrics. These people included experts, novices, and even crowdsourced people from around the world. We applied that information to designs that helped users get a sense of the fabric in various ways, such as showing videos of the fabric, and seeing a cluster of descriptions used to describe a fabric. Using this information, we designed several interfaces, for exploring fabrics remotely. We then studied how users explored and understood fabrics remotely through these interfaces.
Among the most important findings was a set of user interface guidelines for domains that focus on ambiguity and description, such as design.
Our first guideline is that designs must communicate the difference between qualities and categories. For example, one could label all cotton fabrics categorically as “cotton”. However, user confusion might arise when presenting a fabric that is a cotton/silk blend, or one that has silky qualities but is nonetheless made of cotton.
Next, while much research shows that supports ambiguity can be a valuable resource, many practitioners instead see ambiguity as an obstacle. As such, it is important to take this into account when including ambiguous elements into user interfaces. For example, some users may just want to see “thick” descriptor, while others would prefer a series of precise measurements.
This work is interdisciplinary, spanning fields and disciplines like computer science, costume design, and Human-Computer Interaction. This work's impact focuses on designing interfaces that support exploration of materials and description already used in the field.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/78814 |
| Date | 06 September 2017 |
| Creators | Leal, Anamary |
| Contributors | Computer Science, Harrison, Steven R., Luther, Kurt, Tanenbaum, Joshua Glen, Knapp, R. Benjamin, Stein, Jane A. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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