Software prototyping is an important UX design skill that many people “just do” but effective prototyping requires crucial knowledge and practices that aren’t obvious. In this talk, Everett will explain prototyping and its goals, compare prototyping to sketching, and explore the different types of prototyping. He will then characterize effective prototyping and explain why those characteristics are so important.
Everett will review several commonly available prototyping tools (including SketchFlow), and evaluate their pros and cons. He will conclude by working through some examples so that you can see effective prototyping in practice.
If you or your team is prototyping now or considering prototyping in the future, this talk is for you!
The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you sho...Everett McKay
Lean UX is all the rage for 2015, as many teams are starting to adapt it. The goal is to make evidence-based design decisions to learn from our customers, and minimize waste in doing so. But one thing we need more evidence on: if using lean UX actually works! In practice, lean UX is often a rationalization for poorly designed MVPs that fail to deliver the promised benefits.
For the first half of this talk, Everett will present the fundamental concepts and techniques of lean UX, and make a case why they may not deliver their promised results. The second half will be a group discussion about your own experience with lean techniques, and whether or not you agree with Everett's concerns.
While you can design a good user experience by playing it safe, creating a great design often requires the courage to take intelligent risks. In this Keynote for Design Camp Boston 2010, Everett McKay explores courageous design and how courage affects making decisions through consensus and the use of data, asking questions in UI, simplicity, software personality, and, most importantly, team culture. As Everett says, “You can measure the greatness of a user experience by the courage required to design it.”
Running Great Design Reviews With Clients & PartnersCraig Peters
No matter how great your designs are, the way you communicate with your clients/business partners can make or break your engagement, especially as design challenges and organizations become more complex.
But what actually makes some meetings go well, and others not? We’ve heard “Be storytellers,” “Provide the right context,” and “Set expectations,” but what does that look like in practice?
I’ll provide real-life examples of how we’ve done this in our presentations for client engagements. We’ll include examples of our fundamental concepts we live by. No surprises. Over-communicate. Tell them how to be and what to do in the meeting. Design every slide of a presentation, not just the “designs.” Tell a story. Assume your clients have no idea what your meeting is all about (put yourself in their shoes).
It always goes better when you’re well prepared; we’ll help you get there.
Prototyping is essential to designing memorable mobile user experiences, but can often be overlooked at the beginning of building a product. Learn the types of prototypes, tools, and best practices for mobile product design (including overview of mobile flow and UI best practices, patterns, and frameworks).
The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you sho...Everett McKay
Lean UX is all the rage for 2015, as many teams are starting to adapt it. The goal is to make evidence-based design decisions to learn from our customers, and minimize waste in doing so. But one thing we need more evidence on: if using lean UX actually works! In practice, lean UX is often a rationalization for poorly designed MVPs that fail to deliver the promised benefits.
For the first half of this talk, Everett will present the fundamental concepts and techniques of lean UX, and make a case why they may not deliver their promised results. The second half will be a group discussion about your own experience with lean techniques, and whether or not you agree with Everett's concerns.
While you can design a good user experience by playing it safe, creating a great design often requires the courage to take intelligent risks. In this Keynote for Design Camp Boston 2010, Everett McKay explores courageous design and how courage affects making decisions through consensus and the use of data, asking questions in UI, simplicity, software personality, and, most importantly, team culture. As Everett says, “You can measure the greatness of a user experience by the courage required to design it.”
Running Great Design Reviews With Clients & PartnersCraig Peters
No matter how great your designs are, the way you communicate with your clients/business partners can make or break your engagement, especially as design challenges and organizations become more complex.
But what actually makes some meetings go well, and others not? We’ve heard “Be storytellers,” “Provide the right context,” and “Set expectations,” but what does that look like in practice?
I’ll provide real-life examples of how we’ve done this in our presentations for client engagements. We’ll include examples of our fundamental concepts we live by. No surprises. Over-communicate. Tell them how to be and what to do in the meeting. Design every slide of a presentation, not just the “designs.” Tell a story. Assume your clients have no idea what your meeting is all about (put yourself in their shoes).
It always goes better when you’re well prepared; we’ll help you get there.
Prototyping is essential to designing memorable mobile user experiences, but can often be overlooked at the beginning of building a product. Learn the types of prototypes, tools, and best practices for mobile product design (including overview of mobile flow and UI best practices, patterns, and frameworks).
The JoomlaChicago Loop sponsored "Joomla & Responsive Design", a presentation focused on the key ingredients and dynamics of making a Joomla website flow and react to the different viewing devices and browser viewport sizes.
Dennis Kmetz (Director of Interactive Media, Taylor Bruce Design Partnership) presented Joomla & Responsive Design on Thursday, March 1, 2012.
Real World Lessons Using Lean UX (Workshop)Bill Scott
Half Day Workshop given 5/22/2013 at WebVisions Portland.
In this workshop Bill will explore the mindset of LeanUX and how it relates to bring products to life in the midst of big organizations that don't normally think "Lean". He will look at how teams can create a strong partnership between product, design & engineering in a way that tears down the walls and instead focuses on three key principles:
Shared understanding
Deep collaboration
Continuous customer feedback
The workshop will take a look at how Bill has been able to apply Lean UX at PayPal — a place that in recent years has been the total antithesis of the lean startup idea. With very specific examples, he will share lessons learned applying lean to the full product life cycle as well as how it relates to agile development.
Finally, the workshop looks at the technology stack. In the last few years there has been an explosion of open source technology stacks that can support rapidly creating products, launching them to scale and rapidly iterating on them when live. While startups embrace these stacks from the get-go, large organizations struggle with how to embrace this change. This workshop will also look at the shift that has happened, what is driving this change, and how organizations can embrace this stack and how to marry Lean Tech with Lean UX.
Guerrilla Usability: Insight on a ShoestringDavid Sturtz
Presented at Iowa Code Camp, May 2010: Iterative and Agile development mean shorter cycles and a desperate need for quick feedback. Luckily, improving the user experience of your software doesn’t require days in a lab. This session will present more than twenty-five tools and techniques for gaining insight into your users’ minds and actions.
Optimizing for a faster user experience Pt 2: How-to.James Christie
From my presentation "I feel the need..the need for speed: Optimizing the User Experience", given at UXPA Boston 2014. This is the second half of the talk. The first half (are we slow? How slow? Why? And Why That's a Problem) used a ton of animation and rapid patter, and just doesn't make much sense on SlideShare without audio. I need to upload that to YouTube, someday.
This presentation is targeted to developers trying to learn enough design skills to fill in gaps when a ux designer is not available to work on a project. A secondary goal is to give developers insight into the design process.
User Experience Basics for Product ManagementRoger Hart
User Experience (UX) has matured as a discipline and radically changed how products are delivered. It touches workflows, usability, customer needs, and of course visual design and UI. Product managers can't ignore it, even if they want to... and if they want to, they're probably wrong. The tools of User Experience can help us get closer to our customers and differentiate our products.
These slides are from a 2 hour presentation called Design for Developers.
The goal of Design for Developers is to teach interface design as a set of rules: there are some good default values for a lot of design decisions that you should remember, there is a “scientific” way of approaching things like alignment, even though many designers will tell you it’s something you should “feel”.
Rapid User Research - a talk from Agile 2013 by Aviva RosensteinAviva Rosenstein
Doing user research before and during development helps inform your choices about strategy (what to build) as well as tactics (how to build it)-- and it doesn't have to slow down your development process . In fact some rapidly executed research can speed up your time to market by reducing the need to refactor late in a project.
This presentation includes practical information to help product owners and developers quickly get inside the heads of their users, validate product ideas and improve the usability of their software at warp speed. The talk included tips and techniques for recruiting research participants, shadowing and interviewing users effectively, getting valuable feedback on product concepts and information architecture, and rapidly iterating on the user interface to improve usability. They discussed remote testing tools that help teams evaluate if users can successfully achieve their goals with their designs, and reviewed best practices collecting feedback from users after launch.
Software prototyping is an important UX design skill that many people “just do” but effective prototyping requires crucial knowledge and practices that aren’t obvious. As a result, many prototyping efforts aren’t productive and fail to achieve their goals.
In this talk, Everett will explain prototyping and its goals, compare prototyping to sketching, and explore the different types of prototyping. He will then give the eight rules for effective prototyping and show why those rules are so important.
Everett will review several commonly available prototyping tools (including SketchFlow), give nine criteria for evaluating prototyping tools, and evaluate the tools based on the criteria. He will conclude by showing some examples effective and ineffective prototyping in practice.
If you or your team is prototyping now or considering prototyping in the future, this talk is for you!
User experience is vital, and the word "design" seems to be a buzz word and a magical pill to elevate products or services - all thanks to global success and publicity of Apple. Organisations in Asia will benefit by grasping the essence of user experience and design research. Lean UX evolved from well-understood UX practices, to conduct UX in a much leaner and cost effective way. As the saying goes" Some UX is better than no UX"!
Raven will share fundamental concepts and "quick-and-dirty" tips that enable improvement on user experience of products or services in a cost effective manner with case studies.
The JoomlaChicago Loop sponsored "Joomla & Responsive Design", a presentation focused on the key ingredients and dynamics of making a Joomla website flow and react to the different viewing devices and browser viewport sizes.
Dennis Kmetz (Director of Interactive Media, Taylor Bruce Design Partnership) presented Joomla & Responsive Design on Thursday, March 1, 2012.
Real World Lessons Using Lean UX (Workshop)Bill Scott
Half Day Workshop given 5/22/2013 at WebVisions Portland.
In this workshop Bill will explore the mindset of LeanUX and how it relates to bring products to life in the midst of big organizations that don't normally think "Lean". He will look at how teams can create a strong partnership between product, design & engineering in a way that tears down the walls and instead focuses on three key principles:
Shared understanding
Deep collaboration
Continuous customer feedback
The workshop will take a look at how Bill has been able to apply Lean UX at PayPal — a place that in recent years has been the total antithesis of the lean startup idea. With very specific examples, he will share lessons learned applying lean to the full product life cycle as well as how it relates to agile development.
Finally, the workshop looks at the technology stack. In the last few years there has been an explosion of open source technology stacks that can support rapidly creating products, launching them to scale and rapidly iterating on them when live. While startups embrace these stacks from the get-go, large organizations struggle with how to embrace this change. This workshop will also look at the shift that has happened, what is driving this change, and how organizations can embrace this stack and how to marry Lean Tech with Lean UX.
Guerrilla Usability: Insight on a ShoestringDavid Sturtz
Presented at Iowa Code Camp, May 2010: Iterative and Agile development mean shorter cycles and a desperate need for quick feedback. Luckily, improving the user experience of your software doesn’t require days in a lab. This session will present more than twenty-five tools and techniques for gaining insight into your users’ minds and actions.
Optimizing for a faster user experience Pt 2: How-to.James Christie
From my presentation "I feel the need..the need for speed: Optimizing the User Experience", given at UXPA Boston 2014. This is the second half of the talk. The first half (are we slow? How slow? Why? And Why That's a Problem) used a ton of animation and rapid patter, and just doesn't make much sense on SlideShare without audio. I need to upload that to YouTube, someday.
This presentation is targeted to developers trying to learn enough design skills to fill in gaps when a ux designer is not available to work on a project. A secondary goal is to give developers insight into the design process.
User Experience Basics for Product ManagementRoger Hart
User Experience (UX) has matured as a discipline and radically changed how products are delivered. It touches workflows, usability, customer needs, and of course visual design and UI. Product managers can't ignore it, even if they want to... and if they want to, they're probably wrong. The tools of User Experience can help us get closer to our customers and differentiate our products.
These slides are from a 2 hour presentation called Design for Developers.
The goal of Design for Developers is to teach interface design as a set of rules: there are some good default values for a lot of design decisions that you should remember, there is a “scientific” way of approaching things like alignment, even though many designers will tell you it’s something you should “feel”.
Rapid User Research - a talk from Agile 2013 by Aviva RosensteinAviva Rosenstein
Doing user research before and during development helps inform your choices about strategy (what to build) as well as tactics (how to build it)-- and it doesn't have to slow down your development process . In fact some rapidly executed research can speed up your time to market by reducing the need to refactor late in a project.
This presentation includes practical information to help product owners and developers quickly get inside the heads of their users, validate product ideas and improve the usability of their software at warp speed. The talk included tips and techniques for recruiting research participants, shadowing and interviewing users effectively, getting valuable feedback on product concepts and information architecture, and rapidly iterating on the user interface to improve usability. They discussed remote testing tools that help teams evaluate if users can successfully achieve their goals with their designs, and reviewed best practices collecting feedback from users after launch.
Software prototyping is an important UX design skill that many people “just do” but effective prototyping requires crucial knowledge and practices that aren’t obvious. As a result, many prototyping efforts aren’t productive and fail to achieve their goals.
In this talk, Everett will explain prototyping and its goals, compare prototyping to sketching, and explore the different types of prototyping. He will then give the eight rules for effective prototyping and show why those rules are so important.
Everett will review several commonly available prototyping tools (including SketchFlow), give nine criteria for evaluating prototyping tools, and evaluate the tools based on the criteria. He will conclude by showing some examples effective and ineffective prototyping in practice.
If you or your team is prototyping now or considering prototyping in the future, this talk is for you!
User experience is vital, and the word "design" seems to be a buzz word and a magical pill to elevate products or services - all thanks to global success and publicity of Apple. Organisations in Asia will benefit by grasping the essence of user experience and design research. Lean UX evolved from well-understood UX practices, to conduct UX in a much leaner and cost effective way. As the saying goes" Some UX is better than no UX"!
Raven will share fundamental concepts and "quick-and-dirty" tips that enable improvement on user experience of products or services in a cost effective manner with case studies.
Building for People: 5 Practical Tip for Greating Great UXqixingz
If the 20th century is about technology functions, then the 21st century is about technology users. Building useful, usable, and attractive software applications for people is critical to win customers. User Experience (UX) is much more than just UI, it includes all key aspects of application such as performance and availability that you as developers concern. This session will start off with the ROI of great UX and why you should care. Then, 5 practical tips for creating great UX will be shared that you can take home and start improve your software UX right away.
Presentation for graphic design students showing various creative careers in the web business. This acts as an intro for them to explore career choices in designing for the web. Presentation given at Suffolk university on Sept 25, 2009
What are user experiences and how can we design them optimally? Why does UX matter and how does it interface with software development? And what does a unified design approach mean for front-end development at Semantico?
* Why Prototype
To evaluate an idea quickly with participation from intended users
* How to Prototype
Goal-driven task/user flows; relevant content; consistent style for interactive UI elements
* Prototyping with Indigo Studio (basics)
Draw the starting UI for user flow; add interaction to create a new state; make necessary UI changes
* Prototyping for large apps with Custom UI libraries
Standardize UI components by styling and converting them to screenparts, and reuse
* Indigodesigned.com and community
Learn from others; browse and download prototypes and re-usable UI libraries
Human-Centered Design and the Intersection of the Physical and Digital WorldsEffectiveUI
EffectiveUI user experience designers Lindsay Moore and Austin Brown's Lightning Round presentation given at IxDA Interaction '11 in Boulder, CO. "Austin and Lindsay demonstrate how they've redesigned everyday objects based on the combined disciplines of industrial and digital interaction design."
Re-imagining the Design of Everyday ThingsEffective
Human-Centered design and the intersection of the physical and digital worlds. EffectiveUI user experience designers Lindsay Moore and Austin Brown's Lightning Round presentation given at IxDA Interaction 2011 in Boulder, CO. Austin and Lindsay demonstrate how they have redesigned everyday objects based on the combined disciplines of industrial and digital interaction design.
Similar to Effective prototyping (for Vermont Code Camp) (20)
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
This is a hands-on session specifically designed for automation developers and AI enthusiasts seeking to enhance their knowledge in leveraging the latest intelligent document processing capabilities offered by UiPath.
Speakers:
👨🏫 Andras Palfi, Senior Product Manager, UiPath
👩🏫 Lenka Dulovicova, Product Program Manager, UiPath
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
"Impact of front-end architecture on development cost", Viktor TurskyiFwdays
I have heard many times that architecture is not important for the front-end. Also, many times I have seen how developers implement features on the front-end just following the standard rules for a framework and think that this is enough to successfully launch the project, and then the project fails. How to prevent this and what approach to choose? I have launched dozens of complex projects and during the talk we will analyze which approaches have worked for me and which have not.
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
1. 9/11/2011
EFFECTIVE PROTOTYPING Who is this guy?
A developer’s guide to better
Principal of UX Design Edge, a UX design training and
design through prototyping consulting company targeted at non-designers
Was a senior program manager at Microsoft for 10
years
Everett McKay Was on the Windows 7 and Windows Vista teams for 5
years, responsible for managing, writing, and driving the
UX Design Edge
Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines
A Windows and Mac UI programmer before Microsoft
uxdesignedge.com Wrote two books
Developing User Interfaces for Microsoft Windows
(Microsoft Press)
Debugging Windows Programs (Addison Wesley)
Writing another interaction design book now
Vermont Code Camp, September 2011 Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Today’s agenda Quick discussion
Prototyping basics Are you or your team prototyping now?
Effective prototyping How?
Prototyping tools Do you feel it is effective?
Examples
Wrap up My claim: Many prototyping efforts aren’t effective.
From this talk, you’ll see why.
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Prototyping basics
Let’s review the fundamentals
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights
reserved. 1
2. 9/11/2011
What is a software prototype? Goals of prototyping
A software prototype is an interface mockup that To communicate and visualize design ideas
demonstrates how a program or feature is going To evaluate, compare, get feedback, and improve
to look and behave design ideas
To user test specific designs
…and to achieve the above goals more efficiently
than with production code
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Prototypes vs. sketches vs. mockups Levels of prototyping
Sketches: rough ideas, for Low fidelity: Rough sketch or wireframe, no
ideation/brainstorming, concepts matter but attempt to look real
everything else doesn’t Paper,Balsamiq, Axure, Mockingbird, iPlotz,
Mockflow, Word
Prototypes: for task flow and interaction
Medium fidelity: Attempt to look real, but
design, pixels don’t matter obviously not
Mockups: visual design, pixels do matter PowerPoint, Visio, Axure, OmniGraffle, SketchFlow
Code: software engineering matters, High fidelity: Looks real program, may be dynamic
investment results in commitment or have limited functionality
Is this really a prototype or a sketch? A fine line… Real code, Html/Css, SketchFlow, Photoshop,
Illustrator, Fireworks
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Wireframes vs. pixels
A wireframe is a prototype represented by rough
controls, rectangles, lines, text, and simple glyphs
Layout and element sizes are rough
Details like colors, backgrounds, fonts, graphics, and
icons are often omitted
Wireframes are the most common form of low-
fidelity prototyping
Quick and easy to do
Clear that visual design details aren’t up for discussion
But do you really need the wires?
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights
reserved. 2
3. 9/11/2011
Timing is everything Is saving 15 minutes really a big deal?
Time required to create each mockup: Yes!
Mid fidelity (Balsamiq, 24 minutes) It’s not 1 x 15 minutes, it’s n x 15 minutes where n is
potentially a big number
Wireframe (Balsamiq, 20 minutes)
Given a fixed amount of time, 3x faster means 3x
Wireless (Word, 12 minutes)
more design ideas or iterations
Pen on paper (Bic pen, 4 minutes)
As fast as Balsamiq is, Word took half the time
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Effective prototyping
The difference between success and that other
outcome
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Rule 1: Have clear goals Things to prototype
Effective prototypes have clear goals Product concepts
Is your goal: Home pages, landing pages
To communicate design ideas?
To improve design ideas, get feedback?
Task flows
To test design ideas? Page layouts
Can those goals be achieved efficiently without a Complex or unusual interactions
prototype?
Design alternatives (A/B testing)
Questionable goals
Always prototyping regardless of need
Perfection
Completeness
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights
reserved. 3
4. 9/11/2011
Some recent LinkedIn discussions Things to not prototype
Q: Should the floppy disk icon for "Save" command Design principles
be changed to something more modern? Guidelines, conventions
A: Just do a usability test (and note that doing a Minor details
usability test implies some sort of prototype)
Q: Which should be used: login, log in, logon, log
on, logout, log out, logoff, log off Your limited time is better spent elsewhere
A: Just do a usability test (again, implies a
prototype)
Discussion: What do you think? Do you agree?
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Rule 2: Determine communication Rule 3: Choose the right level
Prototyping goals boil down to communicating the Communicating design ideas is the ultimate goal
right design info to the right people Not all communication goals need fidelity
When planning your prototype, be explicit about In fact, most don’t!
this
Determine
What specific design ideas do you need to
communicate?
Whom do you need to communicate them to?
How can you best communicate to them?
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Lower is better The Windows Vista story
Use the lowest fidelity prototyping that does the The Windows Vista design team used Photoshop-
job reasonably well based task flows for design reviews
Enables quick design, faster iteration, creativity They were gorgeous! (Especially compared to XP)
Has the least investment and commitment Typical outcome
Focuses on the high-level issues instead of details Design reviews “went well” with few problems found
Perceived as unfinished and easily changeable, so The actual results were often disappointing (to me)
doesn’t discourage feedback The task flows were super high maintenance
People react emotionally to beautiful things People react emotionally to beautiful things
Beauty hides flaws Beauty hides flaws
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Rule 4: Choose the right tool Rule 5: Avoid tool bias
There is no single best prototyping tool, but here are Is your prototyping tool biased towards certain
some attributes designs?
Efficient (can prototype quickly) Ease of use equals use
Expressive (can prototype any ideas) Ifyour prototyping tool makes solution A easy but
solution B difficult, which do you think you will use?
Flexible (can choose your level)
Don’t let the tool determine your designs
Easy to maintain, manage (important for large
Paper has no bias!
projects)
No design bias (more later)
Do you have a personal tool bias?
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Rule 6: Avoid commitment Rule 7: Throw it away!
A prototype is a prototype only if it is easily thrown A prototype is a prototype only if:
away It is easily thrown away
This means avoiding commitment It is actually thrown away!
The goals of prototyping lead to changing or even
A common conversation with a developer…
abandoning a design idea
A test: Suppose you determine that a design isn’t Code prototypes tend to not get thrown away
working:
Is this good news or bad news?
Are you willing to start completely over or make radical
chances? (Or will you fight for just small changes?)
If bad, you have too much commitment
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6. 9/11/2011
Prototypes aren’t production code What about SketchFlow?
…and vice versa Isn’t code reuse the entire point?
Problem: Goals of prototyping fundamentally Yes, but it shouldn’t be…any decisions based on a
conflict with goals of production code code reuse goal are likely to be bad
If you are writing production code “We want to reuse the prototype code, therefore…”
You aren’t really prototyping, you are coding
Better approach
You can’t achieve any goals of prototyping
Focus on the goals prototyping
If you are writing prototype code
When done, let reuse happen—don’t try to force it
The codewill be hastily written, poorly designed, poor
implemented, full of bugs
Reuse would be a mistake
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Rule 8: Watch for team culture traps Evaluate your prototyping efforts
Managers who are “visual thinkers” What were your goals?
Problem: Manager has weak design skills, demands Were they achieved?
high fidelity prototypes
Result: Design team wastes time on wrong things,
Was the prototype worth the trouble?
prototypes take too long and don’t get good feedback Could the goals be achieved more efficiently?
Higher fidelity prototypes get higher review scores Did you use the right tool?
Problem: Team claims it wants low fi prototypes, but
people who do high fi prototypes get better review
Did you consider design alternatives?
scores Did you throw the prototype away?
Result: You get what you reward
Managers who want code reuse
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Radical claim
Most prototyping efforts aren’t effective
Don’t have clear goals
Prototyping tools
Don’t achieve those goals
An agenda-free survey
Take to much time and effort
Discourages feedback and improvement
Ask yourself: how does your team’s prototyping
stack up to these rules?
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7. 9/11/2011
Prototyping tool attributes Good ol’ paper
The ideal prototyping tool:
Is easy to learn and use
Enables you to communicate your ideas quickly
Is expressive, enabling a wide range of designs
Focuses on the design, not the tool itself
Isn’t biased towards particular designs
Enables good prototyping habits
Encourages feedback
Creates prototypes that are easy to manage and
maintain
Is a good value
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Good ol’ paper pros and cons You can usability test using paper!
Pros
Is easy to learn and use
Enables you to communicate your ideas quickly
Is expressive, enabling a wide range of designs
Focuses on the design, not the tool itself
Isn’t biased towards particular designs
Enables good prototyping habits, including low commitment
Encourages feedback
Is a good value
Cons
Prototypes not easy to manage and maintain
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Microsoft Word Microsoft Word pros and cons
Pros
Is easy to learn and use
Enables you to communicate your ideas quickly
Focuses on the design, not the tool itself
Enables good prototyping habits, including low commitment
Encourages feedback
Is a good value
Cons
Not expressive, focused on text and basic controls
Biased towards particular designs
Prototypes not easy to manage and maintain
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8. 9/11/2011
Balsamiq Mockups Balsamiq Mockups pros and cons
Pros
Is easy to learn and use
Enables you to communicate your ideas quickly
Focuses on the design, not the tool itself
Isn’t biased towards particular designs
Enables good prototyping habits, including low commitment
Encourages feedback
Is a good value
Marginal
Try web version for free at Is expressive, enabling a wide range of designs
http://www.balsamiq.com/demos/mockups/Mockups.html Cons
Prototypes aren’t easy to manage and maintain
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SketchFlow SketchFlow pros and cons
Pros
Is expressive, enabling a wide range of designs
Encourages feedback
Is a good value
Marginal
Focuses you on the design, not the tool itself
Isn’t biased towards particular designs
Enables good prototyping habits, including low commitment
Creates prototypes that are easy to manage and maintain
Cons
Isn’t easy to learn and use
Doesn’t enable you to communicate your ideas quickly
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Using Photoshop Photoshop pros and cons
Pros
Is expressive, enabling a wide range of designs
Focuses you on the design, not the tool itself
Isn’t biased towards particular designs
Cons
Difficult to learn and use
Doesn’t enable good prototyping habits, including low
commitment
Discourages feedback
Doesn’t enable you to communicate your ideas quickly
Prototypes not easy to manage and maintain
Not a good value (Photoshop Elements is though)
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9. 9/11/2011
Other tools
More Office: Visio, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote (on
a tablet) Examples
Windows Paint (horrible!)
Axure (expensive, not especially easy to use)
OmniGraffle (Mac)
Mockingbird (SaaS)
There is no “best” tool!
Use my pros and cons to help you decide
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My favorite prototype SketchFlow in action (homework)
Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJtu5mjOYrU
Is this effective prototyping?
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SketchFlow homework questions
What was the focus of the effort?
Why were key design decisions made?
Wrap up
What is the quality of the design?
How helpful is this prototype? What was its goal,
etc.?
What could you do differently to improve the
prototyping effort?
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10. 9/11/2011
Everett’s rules for effective prototyping Related things to consider
Rule 1: Have clear goals Lower is better
Rule 2: Determine the right communication Always start with paper
Rule 3: Choose the right level Consider using paper—even for user testing
More alternatives, iterations is better
Rule 4: Choose the right tool
Reconsider Photoshop
Rule 5: Avoid tool bias
Tools
Rule 6: Avoid commitment
Focus on the design, not the mechanics
Rule 7: Throw it away!
Consider using different tools for different goals
Rule 8: Watch for team culture traps Use “my favorite prototype” as an inspiration
Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.
Prototyping resources UX Design Edge offerings
Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton UX Design Edge is all about helping teams without
Paper Prototyping, Carolyn Snyder design resources do their best work
Efficient,cost effective consulting
Dynamic Prototyping with SketchFlow, Chris
Bernard and Sara Summers Team, onsite, and online training
Paper Prototyping: A How-To Training Video (DVD), If you need design help, please contact me at
Jakob Nielsen everettm@uxdesignedge.com
Get Effective Prototyping deck from Subscribe to my blog and join my mailing list
http://uxdesignedge.com/EffectivePrototyping
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UX Design Essentials Workshop New! Online UX Design Basics
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11. 9/11/2011
Coming soon! UX Design for Silverlight Top UX Design Edge blog posts
Course concept: Provide developers the UX design From http://www.uxdesignedge.com/blog :
Getting started in interaction design
knowledge they need to use Silverlight to its full
Why “everybody is a designer”: The UX Design Skills Ladder
potential
Intuitive UI: What the heck is it?
With hands-on exercises using Silverlight and Blend!
Don’t design like a programmer
Partnering with RunAtServer, a Montreal-based Design scenarios—and how thrilled users ruin them
Silverlight training company Icon design for non-designers
First course scheduled for November 2011 in Are you sure? How to write effective confirmations
Montreal Interaction design interview question #1
The politics of ribbons
Vermont soon after
Personas: Dead yet?
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Got feedback?
Would love to hear it!
Contact me at everettm@uxdesignedge.com
Questions
Be sure to get a biz card and flyer
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Thank you!
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