Week 6 summary
Low-Fidelity Prototyping are useful because they tend to be simple, cheap, and quick to
produce. And does not look very much like the final product and does not provide the same
functionality.
● Storyboarding
● Sketching
● Wizard of Oz
High-fidelity prototype looks like the final product and/or provides more functionality than a
low-fidelity prototype, High-fidelity prototypes can be developed by modifying and integrating
existing components – both hardware and software.
conceptualizing the design the benefits:
●
Orientation: enabling the design team to ask specific kinds of questions about how
the conceptual model will be understood by the targeted users.
● Open-mindedness: preventing the design team from becoming narrowly focused
early on.
● Common ground: allowing the design team to establish a set of common terms that
all can understand and agree upon, reducing the chance of misunderstandings and
confusion arising later on.
conceptual model provides a working strategy and a framework of general concepts and
their interrelations. The core components are:
●
Metaphors and analogies that convey to people how to understand what a product
is for and how to use it for an activity (e.g. browsing, bookmarking).
● The concepts that people are exposed to through the product, including the task–
domain objects they create and manipulate, their attributes, and the operations that
can be performed on them (e.g. saving, revisiting, organizing).
● The relationships between those concepts (e.g. whether one object contains
another, the relative importance of actions to others, and whether an object is part of
another).
● The mappings between the concepts and the user experience the product is
designed to support or invoke (e.g. one can revisit through looking at a list of visited
sites, most-frequently visited, or saved websites).
The classics include the desktop, spreadsheet and the web.
Metaphors are considered to be a central component of a conceptual model.
Key guiding principles of conceptual design are:
1. Keep an open mind but never forget the users and their context.
2. Discuss ideas with other stakeholders as much as possible.
3. Use prototyping to get rapid feedback.
4. Iterate, iterate, and iterate.
Conceptual design and concrete design are closely related. The difference between them
is rather a matter of changing emphasis: during design, conceptual issues will sometimes be
highlighted and at other times, concrete detail will be stressed.
Concrete design also deals with issues related to user characteristics and context, and two
aspects that have drawn particular attention for concrete design are accessibility and
national culture.
Scenarios
1. As a basis for the overall design.
2. For technical implementation.
3. As a means of cooperation within design teams.
4. As a means of cooperation across professional boundaries, i.e. as a basis of
communication in a multidisciplinary team.
two kinds of resource: physical computing kits and software development kits (SDKs).
Physical computing is concerned with how to build and code prototypes and devices using
electronics.
A software development kit (SDK) is a package of programming tools and components that
supports the development of applications for a specific platform, e.g. for iOS on iPad,
iPhone, and iPod touch, for the Kinect device, and for the Windows phone.
SDK: program tools and components API : inputs and outputs