Learning of various prototyping techniques and methods was an interesting endeavour: despite being experienced in rapid ideation and having participated in many jams and brainstorming activities, I had uncovered a few methods I had never applied before.
As dr. Weinschenk puts it in “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People”, nothing beats a good story: people have learnt to follow short stories, implying causality, stemming from the real life experience (Weinschenk 2011). Because of that, I’ve been employing storyboards for many projects — from writing scripts for promotional videos to delivering complex applications. Storyboards are perfect for helping the stakeholders and the team to visualise the user journeys.
A new and exciting method that I have discovered is called “The Wizard of Oz” — a way of prototyping and testing complex and expensive systems without actually working on the prototype. Making the user believe they are working with the real system sufficiently improves the usability testing results. I am quite tempted to try it out during the upcoming UT for my current project, should the system be complex enough to justify the efforts.
I was reminded that I rarely employ paper prototyping — just like the vast majority of UX designers these days (Nielsen 2020), I have always severely underestimated their importance and preferred low–fidelity wireframes over paper prototypes, especially when the entire workflow was digitalised and moved online.
Paper prototyping isn’t used because people don’t think they will get enough information from a method that is so simple and so cheap.
For the creative challenge this week, I want to use the opportunity to channel my creativity and prototype with paper and cardboard instead of turning to digital solutions.
Uncovering the more sophisticated methodologies, such as MDA Model, pointed me to understanding the importance of focusing on the customer’s emotions first — just as MDA points out to how minor changes in the aesthetics toggles massive changes in the dynamics and mechanics (Hunicke, Leblanc, Zubek), in the UX, the designers, myself included, should never underestimate the importance of the emotion evoked at every stage of the customer’s journey, in order to avoid having to pivot when the deliverables (“dynamics” and “mechanics”) are ready.
References
WEINSHENK, Susan. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. 1ST edition. Berkeley, CA: New Riders Pub, 2011.
Nielsen, J. (2003) ‘Paper Prototyping: Getting User Data Before You Code’ [online], Nielsen Norman Group, 13 April. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/paper-prototyping/ [accessed 27 August 2020]
GREEN, P. and WEI-HASS, L. (1985) ‘The Wizard of Oz: A Tool of Rapid Development for User Interfaces’ [online], University of Michigan, June. Available at: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/174/71952.0001.001.pdf?sequence=2 [accessed 27 August 2020]
NIELSEN, J. (2003) ‘Paper Prototyping: Getting User Data Before You Code’ [online], Nielsen Norman Group, 13 April. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/paper-prototyping/ [accessed 27 August 2020]
HUNICKE, Robin, Marc LEBLANC and Robert ZUBEK. n.d. ‘MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research’ 5.