Notes for seminar # 2 - Alva

For this seminar, the focus of the reading material was on prototyping and evaluating prototypes.

In order to eventually create a first design, it is important to first gather requirements that the product needs to fulfill. You need create an initial conceptual model, a model that takes interface methapors (metaphors that help the user understand the product), interaction types (which support the user’s activities?) and interface types into consideration.

A prototype is an early model that tests a concept or process. There are mainly two different ways of prototyping; low-fidelity prototyping and high-fidelity prototyping. There are pros and cons with both of them, and depending on what developing stage you are in, you should be careful of which to use. A low fidelity prototype has low development cost, so it is often possible to create multiple designs and chose the best features from each of them to use. However, low-fidelity prototypes are often not very detailed, thus they cannot be used for error checking. High-fidelity prototypes are more developed prototypes with more specified and complete functionality, very close to the final product. Since their functions and appearance are highly specified, they can be used for experiments and tests. The user can actually look and feel a high-fidelity prototype as this kind of prototype often have a physical design and is a concreted model of an earlier less specified prototype. It can be applied in scenarios to model situations that can test the usability of the design. The negatives sides are that high-fidelity prototypes are more expensive and time consuming to develop, thus they are also harder to alter if there is something that needs to be changed. High-fidelity prototypes are also not effective for requirement gathering. Consequently, they are not suitable to be used in an early stage of developing a product.

Evaluation is driven by questions about how well a design or a particular aspect of a design satisfy the requirements set for the product, and if the design offers appropriate user experiences. Mostly, is is about doing tests based on experiments and field studies that evaluates the design’s usability.

Question to discuss: How can we evaluate our current design in the best way? And how do we know if our current design meets the requirements we have set for our final prototype?