Guided Research of Peter Mortimer

Towards Understanding the User Interface Designer's Environment: An Empirical Approach

Extensive inquiries into the UI designers creative process have been conducted, yet its
working environment is highly dynamic. There have been many innovations in how
data can be presented to the user. So, this requires artifacts designed by UI designers
to be quickly converted into a functioning user interface. This production step requires
communication between the UI designers and the development team. Understanding the
context for creating UI by UI designers makes the continuous research in this domain
necessary.

The following research questions are answered in the Guided Research:

• How do UI designers create UI mockups?
• What are currently the state of the art UI design tools?
• How does the communication between the developer and the UI designer work?
• What are the main artifacts created in the UI design process?

This Guided Research explores the UI designer's workflow using an empirical approach. An explorative survey with professional UI designers is conducted to understand the UI designer's current design process and to explore the desired improvements from the UI designer's perspective.
The design tools used by the professional UI designers are compared to current design trends extracted from popular UI design platforms. The observations gathered in the interviews are consolidated and common patterns in the UI design process are extracted. As a final artifact of the empirical process, a comprehensive process description presenting all aspects of the UI designer's workflow is created.