When developing new design concepts and redesigning existing ones the idea of using design cards to facilitate the process and creativity has been explored in several different fields. The idea of using design cards as part of design workshops has been explored when developing new design concepts such as game designs , “playful experiences” , and tangible interactions . For example, design cards have been used to “…probing and provoking users’ past experiences and current assumptions.” . Several design cards have been developed based on theoretical frameworks and used to rephrase abstract frameworks into something more operational. Through this transformation the theory can be more tangible and applicable by making cards with keywords, pictures, and questions . It is out of the scope of this blog post to include a detailed review of related literature. Instead, I will briefly outline recent HCI-related research about design cards.
In recent research design cards have mainly been evaluated during initial design phases, and a few during other phases such as evaluation of designs, and redesign. Past literature has pointed out the several general strengths and advantages of design cards. On an abstract level design cards can be considered a design material useable in a collaborative setting when making designs . Wölfel and Merritt (2013)  conducted a review of 18 different forms of design cards or card methods used as part of a design activity, and highlight that design cards have been reported to:
- Supporting design dialogues.
- Cards can act as a common reference among participants.
- Cards are something specific and concrete to talk about.
- Making the design process visible and less abstract.
- Facilitating a design process, for example, by providing structure in the process.
- Physical tokens in the form of cards are easy to include, use, and manipulate.
They divided the purpose and scope of the card systems into three different categories:
- General (8 card methods) (open-ended inspiration.)
- Participatory design (7 card methods) (engage designers and users in the process.)
- Context-specific/agenda driven (3 card methods) (focused on a particular context or design agenda.)
They divided the methodology of the design cards into three categories:
- No methodology (3 card methods.)
- Suggestion for use (7 card methods.)
- Specific instructions (5 card methods.)
In usability engineering, a challenge for developers is how to correct usability problems, especially non-trivial problems. Running redesign workshops with developers and designers actively collaborating has been proposed as one method for exploring redesign opportunities [1, 2]. In a recent study, we decided to explorer if including design cards in redesign workshops would improve the proposed redesigns and support the process of fixing usability problems.
In summery we asked groups consisting of two – three students, following a class about designing and evaluating user interfaces, to make redesign proposals of a given web shop. We provided the groups a list of known usability problems. The groups were divided into four group clusters. The groups in three of the clusters were provided a design card system, a different system for each cluster. The groups of one cluster were acting as control groups and did not receive any design cards. During the redesign exercise, we observed a subset of groups. Afterward, we had the students filling out a survey about their impression of the quality of the redesign, and usefulness of the design cards. Finally, we interviewed a few groups. In addition, six evaluators, three academic researchers, and three practitioners involved in the development of the web shop assessed the quality of the redesigns.
Our initial findings indicate that design cards did not, at least not how we used them in this study, have any major positive effect on the quality of the redesigns. When comparing the quality assessment of the redesigns, we did not find any significant differences in comparison to the control group. The students did not find the design cards particular useful. However, some mentioned that the cards did provide some initial ideas and inspiration. These initial findings might be surprising when looking at the positive results reported from previous studies [5-7]. One major difference in this study is that design cards were included in a redesign workshop, and not during an initial design development or ideation workshop. The students were provided both an existing design, and a list of known usability problems. These seemed to be the main drivers and basis for the redesign proposals.
- Bornoe, N., Billestrup, J., Andersen, J. L., Stage, J., & Bruun, A. (2014). Redesign workshop: involving software developers actively in usability engineering. In Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational (pp. 1113-1118). ACM. DOI: 10.1145/2639189.2670288
- Bruun, A., Jensen, J. J., Skov, M. B., & Stage, J. (2014). Active Collaborative Learning: Supporting Software Developers in Creating Redesign Proposals. In Human-Centered Software Engineering (pp. 1-18). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-44811-3_1
- Bødker, S., Mathiasen, N., & Petersen, M. G. (2012). Modeling is not the answer!: designing for usable security. interactions, 19(5), 54-57. DOI: 10.1145/2334184.2334197
- Halskov, K., & Dalsgård, P. (2006, June). Inspiration card workshops. In Proceedings of the 6th conference on Designing Interactive systems (pp. 2-11). ACM. DOI: 10.1145/1142405.1142409
- Hornecker, E. (2010). Creative idea exploration within the structure of a guiding framework: the card brainstorming game. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (pp. 101-108). ACM. DOI: 10.1145/1709886.1709905
- Lucero, A., & Arrasvuori, J. (2012). The PLEX Cards and its techniques as sources of inspiration when designing for playfulness. International Journal of Arts and Technology, 6(1), 22-43. DOI: 10.1504/IJART.2013.050688
- Mueller, F., Gibbs, M. R., Vetere, F., & Edge, D. (2014). Supporting the creative game design process with exertion cards. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2211-2220). ACM. DOI: 10.1145/2556288.2557272
- Wölfel, C., & Merritt, T. (2013). Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools. In Human-Computer Interaction–INTERACT 2013 (pp. 479-486). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-40483-2_34