Design, Prototyping & Construction

Design, Prototyping & Construction

1. Preece, Jennifer. (2002). Interaction Design. United States of America: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

   • Aranza Estrada A01176250

2. Design activities begin once a set of requirements has been established

   • To effectively evaluate the design of an interactive product, design- ers must produce an interactive version of their ideas

3. Prototyping

   • Ex: paper-based outline of a screen or set of screens, an electronic "picture," a video simulation of a task
   • Allows stakeholders to interact with an envisioned product, to gain some experience of using it in a realistic setting
     • Prototypes answer questions and support designers in choosing between alter- natives
       • Prototyping is used to get feedback on emerging designs. This feedback may be from users, or from colleagues
   • Is a limited representation of a design that allows users to inter- act with it and to explore its suitability.
   • Low Fidelity Prototyping
     • Does not look very much like the final product.
       • Useful because they tend to be simple, cheap, and quick to produce.
     • Storyboarding: low-fidelity prototyping that is often used in conjunction with scenarios
       • Sketching: Many people find it difficult to engage in this activity because they are inhibited about the quality of their drawing
         • They don't have to be anything more than simple boxes, stick figures, and stars.
         • Prototyping with Index Cards: Is a successful and simple way to prototype an interaction, and is used quite commonly when developing websites
   • High Fidelity Prototyping
     • Uses materials that you would expect to be in the final product and produces a prototype that looks much more like the final thing.
       • Offers: Complete functionality, Use for exploration and test.
         • Bad side: More expensive to develop, Not effective for requirements gathering.
       • High-fidelity prototyping is useful for selling ideas to people and for testing out technical issues.
   • Compromises in Prototyping
     • The intention is to produce something quickly to test an aspect of the product.
     • Functionality Provided: Horizontal prototyping (providing a wide range of functions but with little detail)
       • Depth: Vertical prototyping (providing a lot of detail for only a few functions).

4. Construction:

   • Throwaway Prototyping, uses the prototypes as stepping stones towards the final design.
     • Evolutionary prototyping: involves evolving a prototype into the final product.
   • Conceptual Design: concerned with transforming the user requirements and needs into a conceptual model
     • Guidelines: Keep an open mind but never forget the users and their context. Use low-fidelity prototyping to get rapid feedback. Iterate.
       • 3 Perspectives to look out for
         • Which interaction mode? is most suitable for the product depends on the activities the user will engage in while using it.
           • Based on activities, we introduced four general styles: instructing, conversing, manipulating and navigating
             • Models based on objects provide a different perspective since they are structured around real-world objects
         • Is there a suitable interface metaphor? Interface metaphors are another way. Combine familiar knowledge with new knowledge in a way that will help the user understand the system
           • 3 Steps to chose a Metaphor
             • 1) Understand what the system will do.
               • 2) Understand which bits of the system are likely to cause users problems.
                 • 3) Generate metaphors. Looking for metaphors in the users' description of the tasks.
         • Which interaction paradigm? Design philosophies that help you think about the product being developed. Include the now traditional desktop paradigm, with WIMP interface (windows, icons, menus and pointers)
           • Ubiquitous computing
           • Pervasive computing
           • Wearable computing
   • Expanding Conceptual Model
     • Understanding the tasks the product will support is a fundamental aspect of developing the conceptual model
     • Functions may be related temporally, e.g., one must be performed before another
     • What data is required to perform a task? How is this data to be transformed by the system?
     • Scenarios
       • Used to explicate existing work situations, more commonly used for expressing proposed or imagined situations to help in conceptual design
   • Physical Design
     • Physical design involves considering more concrete, detailed issuer; of designing the interface
       • Guidelines: Strive for consistency. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts. Offer informative feedback. Design dialogs to yield closure. Offer errorprevention and simple error handling
       • Widgets: elements such as dialog boxes, menus, icons, toolbars, etc. Each element must be designed or chosen from a predesigned set of widgets.
         • Menus: provide users with a choice that can be a choice of com- mands or a choice of options related to a command
           • Icon design: Designing a good icon takes more than a few minutes. However, icons are cultural and context-specific. Designing a good icon takes time.
             • information display: Making sure that the relevant information is available for the task is one aspect of information display, but another concerns the format.
           • Tools Provided: help design the interface given a specification of the end users' tasks help implement the interface given a specification of the design create easy-to-use interfaces
         • Screen design. There are two aspects to screen design: how the task is split across a number of screens, and how the individual screens are designed.

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