Our ethnographic study showed us that in the early stages of
design, web designers go through an iterative process of
progressive refinement, that each refinement focuses on
finer levels of granularity and an increasing level of detail,
and that sketching is used throughout the early part of this
process. These observations informed the design of
DENIM, an informal sketch-based system supporting web
designers in the early stages of design. DENIM allows
designers to quickly sketch out pages, create links among
them, and interact with them in a run mode. The different
ways of viewing a web site, from site map to storyboard to
web page, are unified through the use of zooming. In an
informal study with seven professional designers, we found
516that they were enthusiastic about DENIM's concepts and
would like to use such a system in their work.