This document discusses various methods for prototyping, including: - Low and high fidelity prototyping using sketches, paper prototypes, mockups, and storyboards. - Experience prototyping to test feasibility, logistics, and customer experience of a service. - Virtual prototyping to test usability based on a virtual model instead of a real prototype. - Rapid prototyping to develop concepts through software or hardware prototypes to clarify requirements. The document provides examples of different prototyping methods and emphasizes the value of prototyping for collecting early feedback to refine designs in an iterative process.

1. Satu Miettinen, Juha Miettinen, Antti Kares, Raisa Leinonen and Timo Sirviö
Kuopio Academy of Design, Savonia University of Applied Sciences
Finland
P.O. BOX 98, FIN -70101 KUOPIO
Email: office@designkuopio.fi
"DE-SME - Intelligent Furniture - Training for Design,
Environment and New Materials in SMEs"
Agreement n. 2009 - 2196 / 001 - 001

2. Theme 5.4.1. Prototyping process: tools and methods
What is prototyping?
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3. Prototyping
• Design Prototyping
• Technology for Developing Communities
• Professor Joe Mertz
• Fall 2006
• http://www.techbridgeworld.org/courses/TDC_F06/l
ectures/L12_Prototyping.pdf

4. Why to Prototype?
• Get feedback from users faster saves money
• Experiment with alternative designs
• Fix problems before design decitions
• Keep the design centered on the user

6. Prototyping can be used
• In good iterative design practices
• To refine designs with formative evaluations
• In good participative design
• Allows for collaboration in interim stages
• To keep the scope of your class projects reasonable
http://www.techbridgeworld.org/courses/TDC_F06/lectures/L12_Prototyping
.pdf

7. Fidelity in Prototyping
• Fidelity refers to the level of detail
• High fidelity?
– prototypes look like the final product
• Low fidelity? (Paper prototyping)
– artists renditions with many details missing

8. Advantage of lowfi
• Cheap = less time and easier to change
• Quick feedback
• More cycles of testing, more prototype
• Widely practiced in industry, even though it
sounds silly in the beginning
http://hci.epfl.ch/teaching/hci/course_material/lofi-
prototype/lecture5-lofi_proto-x6.pdf

9. Prototyping
http://csweb.cs.bgsu.edu/maner/domains/Proto.gif

10. Types of design prototypes
• Low- and high-fidelity prototyping
• Sketches
• Paper prototyping
• Mock-up models
• Storyboarding
• Web-based prototyping
• Software prototyping
• Video prototyping

11. Experience prototyping
• Prototyping method, creating, generating and
modelling new service feature

12. Experience prototyping
• An experience prototype is a representation of a
design, made before the final solution exists. We
need prototyping for electronics, we need to
think about a more total experience like
designing a service or designing what happens
with the chips and the people, then you need
something which is more to do with storytelling,
using video of how to tell a story or theatre for
enactment or computer simulations. All of those
become a necessary part of our prototyping
vocabulary.

13. Experience prototyping
• The rapidness of a prototype cycle between
trying something out and testing it with
people, trying it out with people, is what
makes the relationship between design and
business successful. We can make a small
prototype very inexpensively, we can try it
out, test it and if it’s successful perhaps we’ll
move forward to the next stage.

14. Experience prototyping
• The aim of experience prototyping is to test the
feasibility of the service, the logistics, customer
experience and financial impact of the service
product in a cheap and quick way. An experience
prototype is any kind of representation, in any kind
of medium, that is designed to understand, explore
or communi- cate what it might be like to engage
with the product, space or system we are designing.

15. Kuopio Channel prototype

16. Virtual prototyping
• To test usability based on a virtual model
instead of a real prototype, it may be possible
to push testing earlier into the design process,
where it is easier and cheaper to correct any
potential errors.

17. Virtual prototyping
• Normally, usability testing is done in situations where
both testers and users are at the same time in the
same place. Users perform given tasks with the
system, and testers observe their behaviour to find
problems in the user interface. Often, the test
situation is videotaped to help later analysing of the
session.
• In remote testing, the persons running a test are
distanced, spatially and/or temporally, from the users
of the system to be tested

18. Virtual prototyping
• The internationalisation of markets and
companies has created a need to evaluate and
test products during the design process in a
geographically wide area with users belonging
to different cultures. Products may have
several different potential user groups, or
companies have product development in
several places..

19. Virtual prototyping
• The development of networks has opened
possibilities for distributed activity and also
for remote usability testing. It is possible, e.g.,
to use shared desktop applications, video
conferences, questionnaires located on the
Internet to collect subjective experiences of
users, for example, so that performing some
function automatically opens a reply screen

20. Virtual prototyping
• Many remote testing settings rely on
recording or transmitting both video and
audio of the test situation. Another possibility
would be to collect data automatically from
actual interactions with the product.

21. Virtual prototyping
• Users have also been trained to recognise
usability problems and to report them to product
developers. For example, when developing a
method called as the "user-reported critical
incident, developers had made a special button in
the application under development and testing so
that users could easily generate a problem report
and send that to developers whenever problems
were encountered.

22. Paper prototyping
• This method features a paper-based simulation of
an interface or system. Paper prototypes provide
a valuable and cost-effective means of evaluating
and iterating design options before deciding on
one implementation. Interface elements such as
menus, windows, dialogues and icons can be
sketched on paper or created in advance using
cards, pens, etc. The result is sometimes referred
to as a low- fidelity prototype.

23. Rapid Prototyping
• This method is concerned with developing different
proposed concepts by evaluating software or hardware
prototypes. The development of a simulation or prototype of
the future system can be very helpful. It allows users to get an
idea of the look and feel of the system and provide feedback
on it. Thus it can be used to clarify user requirements options.
Rapid prototyping is described as a computer-based method
which aims to reduce the iterative development cycle.
Interactive, quickly replaceable prototypes are developed in
line with design feedback.

24. References
Heinilä, J. (Ed.), Strömberg, H., Leikas, J., Ikonen, V., Iivari, N., Jokela, T., Aikio,K. P., Jounila, I., Hoonhout, J. and Leurs, N. (2005): User Centred Design
Guidelines for Methods and Tools. VTT Information Technology; University of Oulu, Dept. of Information processing science;
Philips Research, Philips Applied Technologies. The Nomadic Media consortium, November 2005.
http://www.vtt.fi/inf/julkaisut/ muut/2005/UCD_Guidelines.pdf (3.5.2009)
Iacucci, G., Kuutti, K. and Ranta, M. (2000): On the Move with a Magic Thing: Role Playing in Concept
Design of Mobile Services and Devices. DIS ’00, Brooklyn, New York. http://users.tkk.fi/~giulio/ P1_jacucci.pdf (2.5.2009)
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25. This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication
reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any
use which may be made of the information contained therein.
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