DrawIt: a user-drawn design research method for symbol design

Abstract

Symbols are essential to communication design. Unfortunately, designersoften draw unclear symbols because they fail to anticipate how people willrespond. This paper describes a research method to help designers draw better symbols by having users inform symbol drawing decisions. It is based on popular games like Pictionary and findings from vision science on "mental images" and psychology on "basic level" mental categories. It has been developed over five years in multiple studies and demonstrated to help design symbols with clear comprehension.