Gathering user feedback on provisional design concepts early in the design process has the potential to reduce time-to-market and create more satisfying products. Among the parameters that shape user response to a product, this paper investigates how design experts use sketches, physical prototypes, and computer-aided design (CAD) to generate and represent ideas, as well as how these tools are linked to design attributes and multiple measures of design quality. Eighteen expert designers individually addressed a 2 hr design task using only sketches, foam prototypes, or CAD. It was found that prototyped designs were generated more quickly than those created using sketches or CAD. Analysis of 406 crowdsourced responses to the resulting designs showed that those created as prototypes were perceived as more novel, more aesthetically pleasing, and more comfortable to use. It was also found that designs perceived as more novel tended to fare poorly on all other measured qualities.

Sketching and prototyping of design concepts have long been valued as tools to support productive early stage design. This study investigates previous findings about the interplay between the use and timing of use of such design tools. This study evaluates such tools in the context of team design projects. General trends and statistically significant results about “sketchstorming” and prototyping suggest that, in certain constrained contexts, the focus should be on the quality of information rather than on the quantity of information generated, and that prototyping should begin as soon as possible during the design process. Ramifications of these findings are discussed in the context of educating future designers on the efficient use of design tools.

The importance of prototyping in the design process has been widely recognized, but less research emphasis has been placed on the appropriate timing and detail of so-called “throwaway” prototyping during the preliminary design phase. Based on a study of mid-career professional graduate students, statistically significant correlations were found between the time such prototypes were created and design outcome. Building prototypes early on in the design process, or performing additional rounds of benchmarking and user interaction later on during the project (in addition to the typical early stage efforts), correlated with better design outcome, although the total time spent on these activities did not. The correlation between project presentations and reviewer scores are also touched upon. These findings suggest that the timing of design activities is more important than the time spent on them.

A simulation study compared 23 young adult drivers' task completion time, mean glance time, number of glances, and percentage of long glances while performing a navigation entry task with a Garmin portable GPS system and a mobile navigation application (iOS 5 Google Maps) on an iPod Touch. We compared participants' performance on these tasks using the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) eye-glance acceptance criteria. We found that, irrespective of the device used, no participant was able to complete the task within the recommended total time window of 12 seconds. When entering a destination into the iOS interface, only 73.9% of the drivers meet the NHTSA criteria for long duration glances. With the Garmin system, 91.3% of the participants meet this criterion. All participants were able to maintain adequate mean off road glance durations. Finally, we compared the NHTSA recommended method of assessing all off road glances to more traditional methods of assessing glances only to the task interface. Differences between the two methods are discussed.

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