Archive for April, 2009

chowky 看完之後，覺得值得分享。

需要prototyping原因

1. Prototypes 令出來的design更好
文章中提及apple 都有利用prototype

It is no coincidence that Apple, a company with a significant commitment to design, is also renowned for its reliance on prototyping. According to Leander Kahney, a journalist who has followed Apple closely:

“It’s a process where they discover the product through constantly creating new iterations. A lot of companies will do six or seven prototypes of a product because each one takes time and money. Apple will do a hundred—that’s how many they did of the MacBook. Steve Jobs doesn’t wake up one morning and there’s a vision of an iPhone floating in front of his face. He and his team discovered it through this exhaustive process of building prototype after prototype.” (See iPhone pre-launch: Looking “Inside Steve’s Brain”.)

Another important benefit is that prototyping helps designers fail faster. It is rarely the case that the first answer that occurs to someone is really the best solution.

2. Prototypes 促進溝通

chowky 十分認同!除非有了實在的prototype，否則其他users 不擅於由幾幅圖畫去幻想interaction．

Interaction design is about much more than just having good ideas—it’s about expressing a vision, working with people to chart a path forward, and then ultimately executing on that vision. This means that designers have to convey the ideas in their heads to others. One of the most challenging things about this is the fact that while designers are quite skilled at inferring the behaviors of a whole system from a few flat images of a user interface, most other people are not.

“Many clients will have difficulty understanding a design until they see and use the prototype. Like all the other models and diagrams, it is a tool for communicating. Prototypes communicate the message, ‘this is what it could be like’.” (Dan Saffer, Designing for Interaction, p. 114.)

Read the rest of this entry »