Good post from Boxes and Arrows- really worth checking out. Here was my comment:
This was a great overview. I completely agree with you that the point to emphasize about prototyping is not the tool itself, but the way that prototyping allows the team to focus on particular decisions related to information architecture without being distracted by issues of visual design. We’ve been prototyping in this way, the “Low Visual and High Functional Fidelity” way, for almost a decade now. We created a proprietary ‘grayscreen’ prototyping tool that we use to quickly build clickable, HTML prototype sites. Each page can be assembled either with stock generic content, like formatted lists, images, etc., or can have custom HTML placed in the content area. We use the latter approach most, which at first glance seems pretty low-fi. However, I’ve found that the simple HTML approach keeps us (not the client) focused on the basics rather than getting caught up in an unnecessary focus on ‘elegance’ and styling. Also, having the page layouts and functionality created with HTML allows us to make quick changes on the fly while we meet with our clients, rather than having to conclude our reviews, make changes, and then reconvene at a later time. All in all, the “Low Visual and High Functional Fidelity” approach enables a faster and more efficient process.
There are some cases, though, in which a higher visual fidelity has been necessary. We usually won’t go beyond the “grayscreen” visual scheme, but we might get pretty specific with things like relative text sizes if the particular project might benefit. For example, in designing a business news site, we employed very specific type styles in the prototype so our designers could understand how the extremely dense news landing pages’ content was organized.
I wrote a blog post (http://www.newfangled.com/newfangleds_iterative_website_p…) back in April in response to watching a video of David Kelly, founder and CEO of IDEO Product Development, who said about prototyping that “You don’t find anything out until you start showing it to people.” One point that I emphasized was how important capturing feedback is. We have a commenting system built in that allows clients, project managers, designers and developers to contribute direction and feedback in context on a page by page basis. This is often essential for any one of our team members being able to properly interpret the prototype.
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