Information and communication technologies principles and perspectives

1. Information and Communication
Technologies(ICT)
Principles and Perspectives
Study guide-7 Essential reading-8 and 11

2. Prototyping
• the value of prototyping as allowing designers to ‘fail, and fail fast’
• we rarely, if ever, get things right the first time and this is especially true of
complex problems

3. Searching in the design space
1. The designers may not search the design space effectively.
2. The designers may not recognize a good design when they create one.
3. The designers may mistakenly think a bad design is good

4. Why designers used prototyping
• to evaluate and elicit novel information that can be fed back into the design
process
• to communicate design information to users

5. Prototype at different levels
• Product Conceptualization (what will the final system look like and how
will it function at a high level)
• task level prototyping (how will the product mesh with the users’
requirements and expectations in fulfilling their goals when performing a
particular task)
• screen design (when prototyping helps to determine the form and
placement of entities on individual screens)

6. Prototyping techniques
• requirements animation
• rapid prototyping
• evolutionary prototyping
• incremental prototyping.

7. Approaches
• Full prototype versus paper prototype
• Horizontal prototype versus vertical prototype
• Low-fidelity prototype versus high-fidelity prototype
• ‘Wizard of Oz’ prototype

8. When it should be used
• where the application area is poorly defined
• where the cost of rejection of the system by users is high
• there is a contractual requirement to assess the impact of change from the
implementation of the computer system
• to examine the social and cognitive effects of the system prior to release
because it gives the opportunity for hands-on testing by users in realistic
scenarios

9. Problems and Warnings
• it can introduce constraints into the design too early
• Prototyping is also often undertaken exclusively by experts and not by users
• Prototyping can also take a significant amount of time, something that is in
short supply in the software engineering lifecycle
• cannot tell us much about the eventual safety, reliability or response time of
the system