[0424] Working smart and mass prototyping —Highlights of DevTO
Joined this amazing event from DevTO talking about insights towards working and mass prototyping.
Working long, hard or smart
Karney brought up the concepts of working long, working hard and working smart, basically for developers, but I think they can also be applied to design.Though there will be times that we need to work long, hard and smart, most of the times we can only choose 1 or 2 from the 3, as long and hard are not sustainable.
Working Smart — Make the most of your time and efforts
1/understand the 80/20 rule
80% of the benefit comes from 20% of the efforts, and the following 20% will have to be achieved by spending 80% the time. In other words, to build up the basic product, only 20% is enough. But to perfect and improve it, we need to spend large amount of time as the “tail gets very long at stuff like debugging”. Karney shared that they pushed products out quickly, and started to improve at the same time, so they won’t miss the opportunity in the market.
Please refer to Pareto principle in Wikipedia if you’re not familiar with it.
2/Automate your job
Computers are good of repetition, humans are’t.
3/Prioritize aggressively
Work on the most important thing: Enables and Blockers. Karney also shared that they use a KanBan method at Wealthsimple to help to best solve the most urgent problem.
Talking about communication about process, a micro-scale working environment and pairing between developers were recommended.
4/Delegate and leverage
Ask for help, don’t try to do it all yourself.
5/Fake it till you make it
No one needs to know about the wizard behind the curtain. In large corporation, the focus is scaling. But in smaller ones, the most important thing is to have a product to present and sell. At this time, when a real working product is not necessary, we can try faking it to save time and resources, and invest time to develop when there is a higher demand/this is the right direction to go.
Working Hard — Exert more effort you’ll finish faster
There are many explanations on “working hard”, and Karney shared his own understanding.
1/Exceeding expectations
2/Persist when others would give up
3/Dig deep, understand problems fully and ignore failures
4/Stay focus. Don’t procrastinate
Mass prototyping
Tom Green from the Interactive Media faculty in Humber College introduced different prototyping tools including Proto.io, UXPin, Principle, Adobe XD and Origami. Following is his summary on these tools.
1/No one app does it all
2/Each one approaches interactivity and motion differently
3/User testing support is spotty
4/Broswer-based or local
5/Pricing models all over the map
6/Share is inconsistent
Two important insights Tom shared:
Tools are just tools.
Don’t get caught up in tools. Tools are just mediums that can make the job easier, it doesn’t matter what you are using. Till the end, don’t forget the goal of prototyping tools is to test whether a feature/product/interaction…works in a more economic way without investing too much time and resources.
No one sees how you did it. Just focus on how it works.
No matter what kind of methodologies we are taking, what tool we are using, the clients will only focus on the way the prototype looks and works.
Last thing…
I got a chance to talk with Todd, an Android developer and got some great insights on mobile app development.
Between iOS and Android
iOS is developed specifically for app development so it is more user-centered, while Android is firstly developed as a language and then applied to mobile development so it is more engineer-focused. That is why most start-ups start with iOS as it is relatively easier to develop.
Android takes up 87% of the whole global market
Not considering north America, iOS is not a dominant system. In areas like Africa and south America, people can’t afford an iPhone so Android phone is a big winner.
Think about the target users and market when designing an app
If I’m doing a local grocery delivery app, I can choose iOS as my target market is Toronto. But if I’m designing in a global scale, we must consider the real target users with the Android phone. Also, data-connection is a big problem, in less developed areas, data is not stable and expensive, so people rely highly on wifi. That is why whatsapp and twitter got a huge success as it can keep the message on hold, while twitter keeps everything under 140 characters so the size is small enough to load fast.
This is only a personal summary, feel free to comment if you find any mistakes or missing.
