Electronic Sketching on a Multi-platform Context: A Pilot Study with Developers

During the past 45 years there has been a recurrence of interest on supporting sketching at electronic devices and interactive surfaces, and despite sketching recognition to be fairly well addressed on the literature, the adoption of electronic sketching as a design tool is still a challenge. The current popularization of touch screen devices allows designers to sketch using their device of preference, while the current multi-platform capabilities made possible by HTML5 allows sketching systems to run on many devices at the same time. Those two factors combined might pose new opportunities for researchers to explore how designers use sketching on flexible setups by combining heterogeneous sketching devices for design sessions. This may arise new possibilities in the field of prototyping user interfaces since, by using such multi-platform systems, designers would now be able of designing interfaces for multiple devices by producing and testing them on the device itself. This paper reports a pilot experiment conducted with 6 developers, grouped into pairs on design sessions using Gambit – a multi-platform sketching system that provides a lightweight approach for prototyping user interfaces for many devices at once. We performed a discourse analysis of the professionals based on recorded videos of interviews conducted during and after design sessions with the system and aggregated the data in order to investigte the main requirements for multi-platform sketching systems.