It’s official. After nine months of research and nearly two years in the making, my book, Prototyping: a practitioner’s guide has launched. I wrote Prototyping for anyone who’s involved in the process of designing (software) products. If you’re a designer, developer, or business person involved in designing and building products, chances are you’ll find something beneficial in Prototyping.
The first part of the book provides a number of helpful case studies and tips for selling prototyping to your boss and clients as part of the design process—one of the biggest challenges we face in the user experience field today. The next couple of chapters provide eight guiding principles I’ve developed in the past couple of years for improving the success of prototyping in the design process.
Then you’ll find six chapters packed with hands-on tutorials for prototyping with paper, Powerpoint, Visio, Axure RP, Fireworks, and even HTML. Each chapter starts with the pros and cons of the methods or tools, then walks you through basic and advanced techniques for using the tool. You’ll find the example files for these chapters on the book’s website. You can even grab my iPhone stencil for Fireworks—entirely vector.
And finally, I wrap the book up with a chapter on how to effectively prepare for and conduct usability testing on your prototype. I even include a sample waiver you can use with participants and a test guide.
This book wouldn’t have happened without the help and support of a number of people. First, I want to thank Lou Rosenfeld and the advisory board at Rosenfeld Media. I really learned a lot in the process.
I hope every author out there is fortunate enough to have an editor who balances tradition with the willingness to try something new. My editor, Marta Justak, did just that. I can’t thank Marta enough for working with me on this book and ensuring that it stayed true to my vision.
I’d like to thank the following people for contributing their wisdom to this book: Bill Scott of Netflix, Anders Ramsay an independent UX consultant, David Verba of Adaptive Path, Robert Reimann of frog design, Chris Pallé an independent UX consultant, Victor Hsu of Axure, Scott Mathews of Xplane, Tom Humbarger of iRise, Robert Hoekman, Jr. of Miskeeto, Joe Sokohl of Regular Joe Consulting, Nathan Curtis of EightShapes, Henk Wijnholds and Stefan Wobben of Concept7, Jonathan Baker-Bates of Expedia, and Fred Beecher of Evantage.
I also had a number of brilliant people review the chapters I wrote on specific methods and tools to make sure they were accurate. I’d like to thank Jeff Patton, an independent UX consultant and Agile coach, for reviewing my paper prototyping chapter, Anders Ramsay for reviewing my chapters on Visio and HTML, Alan Musselman Lead UI Designer and Fireworks Evangelist at Adobe for reviewing my chapter on Fireworks, and Fred Beecher for reviewing my chapter on Axure RP Pro.
And last, but most certainly not least, I’d like to thank my wife, Angela, for gently reminding me that this book won’t write itself.
Now, what are you waiting for. Go pick up a copy of Prototyping: a practitioner’s guide, start prototyping and change your design process forever. And when you’re done reading it, don’t forget to write a review on Amazon.
Yesterday a group of us got together for a full day of prototyping. The task at hand was to redesign the conference badge for the upcoming Interaction10 Design Conference.
The Problem with Typical Conference Badges
I’ve been to dozens of conferences over the years. Just about every conference I’ve ever been to fails when it comes to conference badge design.
The inevitable flip flopper. Typically, your identity information is on the front of the badge. That’s fine if the badge doesn’t flip around. But every conference I’ve been to is guilty of flipity flopity badge. Why? Well, an anemic round cord doesn’t help. Neither does anchoring it dead center at the top of the badge. The solution is pretty simple—create a system that is anchored better and weighted properly to prevent the flip flop. Oh, and if it does flip flop, account for that—put the identity info on the back.
And you are? Inevitably, you’re going to meet someone who’s name escapes you. I’d prefer to be able to identify you from 10 feet away or so. This way, when I’m walking up to you, or standing in a circle with you, I can use your name when I’m speaking to you. Again, easy fix—bigger type, information hierarchy so that not all things are equal. Make it easy for people to identify the person’s name (and twitter id).
Where am I? Where do I go next? The conversation goes like this:
Q: “Where are you going next?”
A/Q: “Not sure, what session looks good to you?”
A/Q: “I don’t know. Do you have a schedule? I left mine in the room.”
A: “No. I left mine in the room too. It’s too big to carry around. Let’s see if someone else has one.”
Sound familiar? Large printed programs don’t really serve anyone that well. They’re costly (a few conferences I’ve been to spend $15,000-20,000 on printing just the programs). They’re not environmentally friendly. The paper adds another 5lbs to your book bag.
The solution? Don’t print them. Put the full program on a thumb drive that attendees can use afterwards. Or make it available for digital download. Make an iPhone app to view the conference schedule. Integrate a summary schedule into the badge system. Something that allows attendees to view a 3-4 hour window of upcoming sessions. Then allow them to remove it (either a card they can pull out and slide to the back, or a tear out sheet they can remove and put in a recycling bin).
I’m up here. Yes, a few of the women involved brought up the issue of female attendees being sensitive to the location of the badge. Let’s just fix that, shall we? We’ll provide an adjustable lanyard.
Do you have a card? This typically sends attendees rummaging through the bottomless abyss of their tote bag, briefcase, or backpack. Inevitably, the business card is nowhere to be found. We’ll fix that. We’re going to provide an integrated business card holder so you can hand yours out and have a place to collect the ones you get.
You forgot yours? Well, how about we print up something with your name, twitter id and email on it and stick it in the system? Would 20-30 of those do the trick?
Sustainable. Yup, we want to reduce our environmental impact. This means using sustainable materials, manufacturing, and reducing the total materials used in the conference as a whole. So, if we can integrate these things into a smaller system, we’ll reduce the overall impact of the conference. If we can use sustainable materials for the badge/wayfinding system, everyone wins.
Pain in the neck. It has to do all this and more, but can’t weigh more than a few ounces. We don’t want to have to provide neck massages to attendees hauling a 5lb brick on a lanyard around their neck.
Don’t break the bank. Production costs have to be reasonable. Electronic badges run $120+. That’s not within our budget. We’re aiming to keep these in$5-15 range.
Prototyping the Badges
We split the group into two teams. Each team prototyped their badge/wayfinding system concept. In true design studio fashion, each team presented their work to the other team for critique, and then incorporated the critique into a second iteration of their prototype. We did shuffle the team members between sessions to cross-pollinate.
The presentations for both the initial prototypes and the subsequent iteration were video taped. I’ve got a little bit of editing to do, but I’ll be posting some of the video from these concepts online in the coming weeks.
One of the interesting side-effects of prototyping these badges was how well the process worked at working through the designs. During the afternoon session, while Austin and I were prototyping out the second iteration of our concept, we uncovered a number of design opportunities during the prototyping process. Our ideas just seemed to evolve as we prototyped. We started sketching and at one point, Austin turned to me and said “Let’s just start building it.” Game on.
Once we started, the whole thing started taking shape. We were able to identify problems faster by having something tangible to work with. We were able to identify new design opportunities and ways to easily incorporate solutions to the design problems we were solving for.
Innovation Through Happy Accidents
A number of the innovations we came up with during the prototype happened accidentally. One of them was figuring out ways to reduce the flipity flopity issue with badges. Another one was a way to make business cards and schedules more accessible. And then there was the accidental discovery of having no where to take notes, which lead to the idea of incorporating some type of fieldnotes booklet.
What’s Next?
We’re still working on the concepts, but have 2-3 really good designs so far. Each of them are unique, but address the design problems I’ve mentioned.
We’re currently deconstructing the prototypes to figure out how we make the holder out of a single die cut. Then we’ll be looking into manufacturing and materials options.
Stay tuned. In the following weeks, I’ll post how things are coming along and show some videos and photos of the concepts.