Evaluating the impact of a pattern structure on communicating interaction design advice

This study reports findings from a controlled experiment evaluating the benefits of structuring design advice as patterns. Over the years, the pattern concept from architecture has become a native within the HCI community and its related discussions on sharing design knowledge. It is argued that the context-rich, and tangible, nature of patterns has contributed to its acceptance by the community. And despite a lack of empirical work demonstrating benefits of patterns to design or communication, pattern collections continue to grow in popularity and acceptance. This research responds to the call for much needed empirical work in the area of patterns in HCI, and explores the value of a pattern structure. Our findings suggest that it may be beneficial to combine the strengths (or differences) of each advice structure (pattern and claim) to yield a more robust structure to capture design advice. We arrive on these findings based on evaluating design advice produced using either a pattern or claim structure. Two expert judges using the following four criteria rated the prepared advice: context-ofuse described, rationale provide, usefulness of advice, and overall quality.We argue that while patterns may be "natural" approach exploited by design professionals, the discussion on what patterns may have to offer may has been corrupted by a narrow focus on patterns-as-result. We suggest that patterns need a renewed focus and rethink, but this time exploring the benefits of patterns-as-a-process. We also argue that trade-offs in context are integral to a design activity, and why design advice needs to be about resolving trade-offs, and not about specific usability goals. Furthermore, discussing cons as part of the advice can lead to identifying more number of participating design issues, help in scoping the context-of-use, reflect the maturity and confidence in given advice, and potentially seed re-design activity. Design advice, as proposed (i.e., unifying patterns and claims), has the potential to fulfill a gap between theory based design methods and concrete design instances.Ph.D., Information Science and Technology -- Drexel University, 201