Charrette is a tool to help user interface designs add annotations about their design process and rationale within their workspace.
While there are many tools to support designers process, designers use their canvas in tools like Illustrator, Sketch, etc. to informally document their process, taking advantage of spatial memory.
Our solution was to build a lightweight layer on top of the design canvas to allow for simple annotations: scribbles, text, and highlight boxes.
Charrette then organizes these annotations into timelines so that they designer can search and navigate through iterative processes later on.
Note that this is different from formal version control like Git: rather than track every change to a file, Charrette lets designers make parts of their canvas interactive only as they wish.
I had the opportunity to work on Charrette as an intern at Adobe Research before I started graduate school.
It was my first time taking the lead on a large research project, and I am thankful to my mentors (coauthors) without whose help I could not have finished the project.
I would also like to thank all the designers who shared their thoughts and tested out Charrette.