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Design, Prototyping and Construction

The document discusses different types of prototyping used in design including low and high fidelity prototyping. It covers conceptual design, using scenarios and stories to create prototypes, and the importance of prototyping to answer questions during the design process.

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Moody Kat
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
100 views26 pages

Design, Prototyping and Construction

The document discusses different types of prototyping used in design including low and high fidelity prototyping. It covers conceptual design, using scenarios and stories to create prototypes, and the importance of prototyping to answer questions during the design process.

Uploaded by

Moody Kat
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 26

Design, prototyping

and construction

www.id-book.com 1 ©2011
Overview
• Prototyping and construction

• Conceptual design

• Physical design

• Generating prototypes

• Support for design

www.id-book.com 2 ©2011
Prototyping and construction
• What is a prototype?
• Why prototype?
• Different kinds of prototyping
low fidelity
high fidelity
• Compromises in prototyping
vertical
horizontal
• Construction

www.id-book.com 3 ©2011
What is a
prototype?
In other design fields a prototype is a
small-scale model:
• a miniature car
• a miniature building or town

www.id-book.com 4 ©2011
What is a
prototype?
In interaction design it can be (among other things):
• a series of screen sketches
• a storyboard, i.e. a cartoon-like series of scenes
• a Powerpoint slide show
• a video simulating the use of a system
• a lump of wood (e.g. PalmPilot)
• a cardboard mock-up
• a piece of software with limited functionality
written in the target language or in another
language

www.id-book.com 5 ©2011
Why
prototype?
• Evaluation and feedback are central to interaction
design
• Stakeholders can see, hold, interact with a
prototype more easily than a document or a
drawing
• Team members can communicate effectively
• You can test out ideas for yourself
• It encourages reflection: very important aspect of
design
• Prototypes answer questions, and support
designers in choosing between alternatives

www.id-book.com 6 ©2011
Filtering dimensions of
prototyping

www.id-book.com 7 ©2011
Manifestation dimensions of
prototyping

www.id-book.com 8 ©2011
What to
prototype?
• Technical issues

• Work flow, task design

• Screen layouts and information display

• Difficult, controversial, critical areas

www.id-book.com 9 ©2011
Low-fidelity
Prototyping
• Uses a medium which is unlike the final
medium, e.g. paper, cardboard

• Is quick, cheap and easily changed

• Examples:
sketches of screens, task sequences,
etc
‘Post-it’ notes
storyboards
www.id-book.com‘Wizard-of-Oz’ 10 ©2011
Storyboard
s
• Often used with scenarios, bringing
more detail, and a chance to role play

• It is a series of sketches showing how a


user might progress through a task
using the device

• Used early in design

www.id-book.com 11 ©2011
Sketchin
g
• Sketching is important to low-fidelity
prototyping
• Don’t be inhibited about drawing ability.
Practice simple symbols

www.id-book.com 12 ©2011
Card-based prototypes

• Index cards (3 X 5 inches)


• Each card represents
one screen or part of screen
• Often used in website
development

www.id-book.com 13 ©2011
‘Wizard-of-Oz’

prototyping
The user thinks they are interacting with a
computer, but a developer is responding to
output rather than the system.
• Usually done early in design to understand
users’ expectations
• What is ‘wrong’ with this approach?

User

>Blurb blurb
>Do this
>Why?

www.id-book.com 14 ©2011
High-fidelity
prototyping
• Uses materials that you would expect to be in the
final product.
• Prototype looks more like the final system than a
low-fidelity version.
• For a high-fidelity software prototype common
environments include Macromedia Director, Visual
Basic, and Smalltalk.
• Danger that users think they have a full
system…….see compromises

www.id-book.com 15 ©2011
Compromises in
prototyping
•All prototypes involve compromises
•For software-based prototyping maybe there is a
slow response? sketchy icons? limited
functionality?
•Two common types of compromise
• ‘horizontal’: provide a wide range of
functions, but with little detail
• ‘vertical’: provide a lot of detail for only a
few functions
•Compromises in prototypes mustn’t be ignored.
Product needs engineering

www.id-book.com 16 ©2011
Construction
• Taking the prototypes (or learning from
them) and creating a whole
• Quality must be attended to: usability (of
course), reliability, robustness,
maintainability, integrity, portability,
efficiency, etc
• Product must be engineered
Evolutionary prototyping
‘Throw-away’ prototyping
www.id-book.com 17 ©2011
Conceptual design: from
requirements to design
• Transform user requirements/needs into a
conceptual model
• “a description of the proposed system in terms
of a set of integrated ideas and concepts about
what it should do, behave and look like, that
will be understandable by the users in the
manner intended”
• Don’t move to a solution too quickly. Iterate,
iterate, iterate
• Consider alternatives: prototyping helps

www.id-book.com 18 ©2011
Is there a suitable
metaphor?
• Interface metaphors combine familiar
knowledge with new knowledge in a way that
will help the user understand the product.
• Three steps: understand functionality, identify
potential problem areas, generate metaphors
• Evaluate metaphors:
How much structure does it provide?
How much is relevant to the problem?
Is it easy to represent?
Will the audience understand it?
How extensible is it?
www.id-book.com 19 ©2011
Considering interaction types

• Which interaction type?


How the user invokes actions
Instructing, conversing, manipulating or
exploring

• Do different interface types provide insight?


WIMP, shareable, augmented reality, etc

www.id-book.com 20 ©2011
Expanding the conceptual
model
• What functions will the product perform?
What will the product do and what will the
human do (task allocation)?
• How are the functions related to each other?
Sequential or parallel?
Categorisations, e.g. all actions related to
telephone memory storage
• What information needs to be available?
What data is required to perform the task?
How is this data to be transformed by the
system?
www.id-book.com 21 ©2011
Using scenarios in conceptual
design
• Express proposed or imagined situations
• Used throughout design in various ways
• scripts for user evaluation of
prototypes
• concrete examples of tasks
• as a means of co-operation across
professional boundaries
• Plus and minus scenarios to explore
extreme cases
www.id-book.com 22 ©2011
Generate storyboard from scenario

www.id-book.com 23 ©2011
Generate card-based
prototype from use case

www.id-book.com 24 ©2011
Support for
design
• Patterns for interaction design
• individual patterns
• pattern languages
• pattern libraries
• Open source systems and components

• Tools and environments

www.id-book.com 25 ©2011
Summar
y
• Different kinds of prototyping are used for different
purposes and at different stages
• Prototypes answer questions, so prototype
appropriately
• Construction: the final product must be engineered
appropriately
• Conceptual design (the first step of design)
• Consider interaction types and interface types to
prompt creativity
• Storyboards can be generated from scenarios
• Card-based prototypes can be generated from use
www.id-book.com 26 ©2011
cases

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