Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of
concept prototype?
Sometimes
it can be necessary to make sure that you are on the right track when designing
a system etcetera. A good way to find out if you are indeed on the right track
is developing a proof of concept prototype. This lets you show your ideas to
those they might concern, and get valuable input regarding possible changes,
things that is worth getting rid of and things that must be included. Why it’s
so valuable to get in this face is of course the time/cost factor. The cost of
change in a design research project can get really high if you want to make
changes at the end of the project. This can be both time-consuming and
expensive. The earlier you make the necessary changes, the easier they will be
to make, and this also guarantee that you use your time efficiently.
What are characteristics and limitations of
prototypes?
To quote
Wikipedia on this one: “A prototype is an early sample or model built to test a
concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from.” It’s
a good explanation, and it would be a futile attempt if I attempted to come up
with a better one. What I can say though, is that these days prototypes are not
the lone kid on the block. Several other methods are used to test your ideas.
Mock-ups are one: where you create a simple very narrow website for example,
just to test your key features. This can also be called prototyping of course,
but when I (and certainly not just me) hear the word prototype I tend to think
about something tangible and physical.
Prototypes
have several limitations of course. Their very existence is a limitation. A
prototype is never a finished product or system, which sometimes makes their
evaluation a bit difficult, especially if you include members of the targeted
user group. For example things like design could be a problematic thing to
prototype, since you cannot work on it to long (its just a prototype after all)
but then again the persons you show it to might not like the unfinished or
rough sketches that you bring to the evaluation. Tricky.
The article
I’ve selected for this Theme is “Alleviating communication challenges in film
scoring: an interaction design approach” by J. Phalip, M Morphett & E.
Edmonds. I believe that this article uses the theory as guidelines to what
needs doing. They identify a problem, divide it into different parts and
outline their solution to the problem by doing this.
The
explorative study performed in the article makes use of several different methods
of data collection: questionnaires, video and sound-recorded interviews,
observations in the subjects work environment and oral and email discussions.
All these methods have their individual cons and pros, but combined (mixed!)
like this they really result in a lot of qualitative data and a good
understanding of the problem that is to be alleviated.
I again see
that you can successfully combine different qualitative methods so that they
together lets you understand the views and struggles of the users or target
group. I liked that the authors chose to both interview subjects and observe
them. I guess that it is effective in the way that you get both the subjects
picture and your won to compare with. That is basically all the new things I
learned.
Very interesting blogpost) Have u ever use some design papers during writing your academic papers? Because, personally, for me it was kinda first paper of such kind)
SvaraRaderaWell, not during the work for my Bachelor Thesis, mine was more of an investigation. But there exists a lot of good articles about this that you can use, both as references and as inspiration. Try Google Scholar with keywords: Interaction design, design evaluation or multimodal maybe? :)
RaderaYour ideas about the first part, the necessity to develop a proof of concept prototype, seems very similar to the idea behind iterative development and for example Agile development, which I find very interesting. The time/cost factor is often a key factor, which techniques like Agile focus on. One could say that developers are constantly prototyping when developing in such practices or conducting test-driven development of some kind. Prototyping is such a widely used technique in product development, which shows how important and useful it is.
SvaraRaderaThe limitations that you discuss are interesting as well. I would say that the “status” of the prototype presented for a client etc. probably should depend upon the client and your target. As you mention, one might not be able to put too much work into a prototype (because of time limitations), but still want it to look good. If it is a sales pitch, I believe that you actually should put as much time into the prototype as possible. On the other hand, if your are designing a mobile interface or website, a rough mock-up is more likely to receive constructive criticism and in turn enable you to improve the design. A well-polished prototype, which looks too “good” or too “finished”, might discourage the client to give criticism and lead to a so-so result in the end.