Ricci Street < Gizmos, Inc. < Kiln || search | sitemap | help gazette | theater | bistro

|

Prototyping this page

the team

visual design - static and interactive look-and-feel, art
human factors - usability engineering, cognitive science, psychology
communications - content from marketing, customer service, operations, etc.
computer science - network maintenance and plumbing, database programming, scripting, coding

visual design

interface design
parts of the interface

human factors

usability testing
gender differences
brain differences
learning styles and multiple intelligence

software learning styles

Software was made by boys for boys. Look at their language: killfile, abort this program, .exe stands for executable. Hits.

The Internet was made by academics for academics to share files. The recording industry calls it thievery when you and I do it. Shouts of "copyright infringement" are heard throughout the land.

That leaves out most of the folks now using software and the Internet. They are neither boys nor academics. Not only that, they are different from each other.

multiple intelligences

culture differences

accessibility differences

WebAble - "the authoritative Web site for disability-related internet resources"

Bobby - analyzes web pages for their accessibility

sides of the brain

gender differences

communications

information design

Who is the web for? -- individual members of market segments

What is its purpose, part I? -- your strategic objectives

What is its purpose, part II? -- users' tasks, roles

What will go into the web? -- words, images, sounds, activities

What will go into each node? -- chunks, groups of chunks

What will the web links connect? -- relative links

What will the Web links connect to? -- absolute links

What will the interfaces / screens look like? -- palettes and grids

What will the navigation system look like? -- where? how big?

What will be interactive? -- why?

computer science

How geeky do you have to be?

I predict that it will be the responsibility of each of us to design and create our own professional webs, especially on intranets. Many of us will have our own personal webs just as we have personal lives away from the job. For larger organizations, the rising young MBA will not have to actually code the final version of the corporate web that will carry out the official management strategies.

You may well be expected, however, to maintain parts of that marketing web, for instance. For example, you may moderate the Bistro-like discussion list of customers interested in some aspect of your product just as I moderate the Bistro, a customer (student) discussion forum for my employer's graduate-school division.

You certainly will be expected to participate in the design of that web, what I here call information design. In fact, after this course, you should volunteer if the opportunity arose. At some point, that design group is going to hand something across the Geek Line to the folks who will actually be responsible for making the thing polished and workable. They'll write the code and scripts that are needed to replace the freeware you assembled. They'll get all the colors to be just right, all the gifs as small as possible. That's their job. Too often, they design the thing, too, because no one else did.

So there you are on the design team. On the one extreme, you can hand off scratches on a napkin "created" during a three-martini luncheon. On the other extreme, you can hand off a fully functioning, extensively user-tested, well thought-out prototype that the big boss has already signed off on.

Prototype is just a nice way of saying unfinished.

Guess which extreme is going to be quicker, cheaper, and more likely to get you what you want in the long run? And I think the coders may be happy, too, because you made all the judgment calls for them and they got to do what they do best.

In its organized form, this type of new media marketing design process is called rapid prototyping. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that in the real world you might end up with very few hours to work on a prototype, as few as you have until the end of the module. Also, the further along the prototype is, the better. If it's not so far along, hey, maybe you'll have more rework later.

A caution from Alan Cooper:

The Perils of Prototyping

Prototyping tools distract the designer from being an advocate for the user.

A note on copyright

While making an in-house prototype to hand off to the graphic artists and HTML coders, your marketing design team is free to use anything they find, including copyrighted material, that will help give a sense of what they want.

Rapid Prototyping Tools

Depending on where you are in the development process, you may find a presentation program like PowerPoint more useful than an HTML editor like FrontPage. Especially as the word processor and html editor merge, you will be expected to work with either type of program with equal ease. I say type of program because if you know these two, you don't need more than a few hours to get up to speed on Corel's or Adobe's products.

You may find a large piece of paper and some colored crayons most useful. Then there are the cliches: napkins and backs of envelopes.