Exploring Designers’ Practice of Online Example Management for Supporting Mobile UI Design

The use of digital examples plays a critical role in mobile UI design. Yet, it remains unclear how UX/UI designers manage (i.e., collect, archive, and utilize) examples to facilitate their design processes at different stages, and what possible challenges are imposed on the design of proper tools to support these practices. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative interview study with mobile UI/UX designers (12 experts and 12 novices), deriving the commonality in practices and analyzing possible differences across four design phases (Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver) and expertise. In brief, we find that there is more diverse and frequent use of examples in the Discover and Develop phases, and that experts take more diverse advantage of the information from examples compared to novices. We further identify the challenges faced by designers when using existing example management services, and propose potential design implications for the development of more supportive design tools in the future.