I Ain’t Got No Type (Except Prototypes)

Before IXDMA the word ‘prototype’ was foreign to me. I think I understood the concept of it but if someone asked me to prototype any of my ideas I would be lost. Now, with a lot more knowledge and tools at my disposal, prototyping is more complex and important that I originally thought. With my advertising background, I mostly made ads (go figure); print and digital. There wasn’t any prototyping involved. We simply brainstormed ideas, sketched, then created. It was a lot more straightforward. Now with all of my effort being in interaction design, I don’t think I could get any good (or bad) ideas created if I didn’t prototype first.

According to UX Magazine’s article “What A Prototype is( and is Not)”, a prototype is

“ . . . a simulation of the final product. It’s like an interactive mockup that can have any degree of fidelity. The main purpose of building prototypes is to test whether or not the flow of the product is smooth and consistent. Prototypes breathe life into any design and provide a great deal of insight into the user interaction at various levels. Not only do prototypes allow us to test the feasibility and usability of our designs before we actually begin writing code, they also lead to unexpected discoveries and innovations that may or may not take our project beyond its initial scope.”

From class, the prototyping process has been a little like this:

1. come up with an idea
2. sketch and brainstorm
3. create low-fidelity wireframes/sketches
4. create clickable prototypes from those sketches
5. create high-fidelity wireframes/sketches
6. create clickable prototypes from those sketches
7. do some user testing and make any changes then bang! you have your product/service

In several of my classes, I’ve put this prototype process to work. In Emerging Interfaces, Chris Kemp and I connected a smart-water bottle that would tell you when to drink water to keep you hydrated throughout the day. It would alert you through a vibration and sound alert and be connected to the internet to factor in temperature and other environmental factors that toweled effect dehydration. This idea isn’t far fetched and there is the technology available today to create it, however the toughest part of our concept was the alert systems. If you’re hiking, how would you feel a vibration in your backpack. Would you want to be annoyed with an electronically noise while you’re enjoying nature? Is this a tool that people would even use? After coming up with the idea, it came time to prototype. I figured we’d have to build the actual internet-connected water bottle and I was nervous. But then we decided to just focus our prototype on the alert-system, our biggest problem. The next day armed with my iPhone with an alarm set for every 20 minutes to drink water, I soon realized that I was way more dehydrated than I realized. The constant alerts were a lot more helpful than I noticed and with a strong enough vibration it was easy to feel through my backpack.

This is the part of prototyping that I like, where you come to realizations and see your ideas come to life and the potential that they have. However in our coding class prototyping helped me realize not that my idea was genius, but that it wasn’t going anywhere. Which is another plus to the prototyping process. After creating sketches and low-fidelity wireframes of a family messaging app idea I thought of, I realized that I was stuck with this product and that I needed to start going in a different direction. This realization came through may attempt at making high-fidelity wireframes for a clickable prototype and despite the weeks of wasted time, I now have an idea of where not to take my app idea and start thinking down a different path.

Through all this prototyping we have been introduced to so many new tools. Being a big Adobe fan, I really love using Xd to wireframe, but the industry standard Sketch is just as great of an application. Then there is POP, a mobile app that turns your sketches on paper into clickable prototypes through hotspots, and InVision which does the same thing but instead uses your low/high-fidelity wireframes to help you see the flow of your product. There are countless tools out there for designers to prototype their ideas. From paper to digital prototypes, the results are still the same.

Since the IXDMA program is pretty much pro at prototyping, we were given the opportunity to learn rapid prototyping. Which is basically the whole prototype process but accelerated. Following in the footsteps of the folks at Google Venture, we are going to have our own design sprint for a week. Each day focusing on a different part of the design process: understand, define, diverge, decide, prototype, validate. Through this rapid process we will be able to come up with, test, and critique an idea for efficiency and success. This is going to allow us to see our finished product along with customer reactions before making any commitments beforehand. Companies all over the world have started using these sprints to test out ideas and products and have had great successes and saved their asses from huge failures. So with that, keep on making things and testing them out. Failures are just as good as success stories.