beck ux

One question many discourse analysts ask when they’re familiarizing themselves with data is: how could things be different? If you’re comfortable messing around with Photoshop and your text includes images, then you can create sketches as a way of making these hypothetical differences more concrete. Sketching is a powerful way to explore the effects of, say, a different images, color schemes, or fonts. Take a look at the following sketch I made:

On top is what Mendeley, a popular reference management system, looks like when you visit its website. On the bottom is a mock-up of what the site would look like with a different background image, color scheme, font, and even text (“create a free account” versus “create account”).