Poirot: A Web Inspector for Designers

To better understand the issues designers face as they interact with developers and use developer tools to create websites, we conducted a formative investigation consisting of interviews, a survey, and an analysis of professional design documents. Based on insights gained from these efforts, we developed Poirot, a web inspection tool for designers that enables them to make style edits to websites using a familiar graphical interface. We compared Poirot to Chrome DevTools in a lab study with 16 design professionals. We observed common problems designers experience when using Chrome DevTools and found that when using Poirot, designers were more successful in accomplishing typical design tasks (97% to 63%). In addition, we found that Poirot had a significantly lower perceived cognitive load and was overwhelmingly preferred by the designers in our study.