Vice President of Newfangled.com, Writer for PRINT and F+W Media, blogger, infrequent designer, reader, science fiction enthusiast...

March 30th 2011

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My latest article for Newfangled is up. Here’s a clip…

Prototyping for Designers

Over the past month, I’ve been conducting interviews with many of our agency partners, clients, and colleagues to gather their feedback and deepen our understanding of the industry we serve. The things I’ve been hearing are both affirming and challenging, and I’m excited to begin to apply their insights to a variety of things, from how we work to the kinds of content we create. While I’m naturally cautious and unlikely to rush into things, I don’t want to waste any time in acting upon feedback if there’s something I can do differently right now. In fact, I’m starting with this article, which I’ve written in direct response to some particularly wonderful feedback I received from our friends at Callahan Creek in one of these interviews just a couple of weeks ago.

The gist of it was this: There is still come confusion about how designers should interpret prototypes, resulting in many unanswered questions up front. What, exactly, is the role of design in prototyping? Once a prototype is approved, which aspects of it should designers take literally and which are more flexible? As I listened to these questions, I realized that, despite having plenty of content about why we prototype and how the process works, we needed to answer them with material directly addressing the relationship between prototyping and design.

So, without further delay, here it is. Just a heads-up: this article is quite long and includes many visual examples that I hope will clarify the prototyping and design relationship. It doesn’t need to be read in one sitting, but if you do want to tackle it all at once, you might want to top off your coffee and find a comfortable spot…

Read the rest here >

Posted at 8:00am and tagged with: design, prototyping, web-design, longreads,.

My latest article for Newfangled is up. Here’s a clip… Prototyping for Designers Over the past month, I’ve been conducting interviews with many of our agency partners, clients, and colleagues to gather their feedback and deepen our understanding of the industry we serve. The things I’ve been hearing are both affirming and challenging, and I’m excited to begin to apply their insights to a variety of things, from how we work to the kinds of content we create. While I’m naturally cautious and unlikely to rush into things, I don’t want to waste any time in acting upon feedback if there’s something I can do differently right now. In fact, I’m starting with this article, which I’ve written in direct response to some particularly wonderful feedback I received from our friends at Callahan Creek in one of these interviews just a couple of weeks ago.The gist of it was this: There is still come confusion about how designers should interpret prototypes, resulting in many unanswered questions up front. What, exactly, is the role of design in prototyping? Once a prototype is approved, which aspects of it should designers take literally and which are more flexible? As I listened to these questions, I realized that, despite having plenty of content about why we prototype and how the process works, we needed to answer them with material directly addressing the relationship between prototyping and design. So, without further delay, here it is. Just a heads-up: this article is quite long and includes many visual examples that I hope will clarify the prototyping and design relationship. It doesn’t need to be read in one sitting, but if you do want to tackle it all at once, you might want to top off your coffee and find a comfortable spot… Read the rest here >

October 7th 2009

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Cindy Chastain, in Experiencing Themes for Boxes and Arrows. A good article for sure. Here was my comment:

You had my interest immediately when I realized that you were both a designer and screenwriter (I got my BFA in film/video at RISD, but now work in web development). I completely get the idea of making the “story” the unifying element that brings together each individual discipline represented in the development process.

We’ve been exploring the concept of personas, who, as characters in the overall “story,” represent the goals of a site as well as the challenges of succeeding at those goals. By creating specific personas for each project, we can anticipate some of the barriers to communication, as well as identify new ways to articulate messages through copy and design that are most appropriate to the end user.

I’m with @Giles- there is much to enjoy in your article. I’m going to have our Project Management team read this as part of our professional enrichment program.

Posted at 11:04am and tagged with: quote, prototyping, design, user-interface-design,.

“

In the case of user-centered design, we do well at coming up with the right technology and features that perform in a way that meets the needs or behaviors we observe in our users. But we often neglect to consider the story that’s told through the interactions people have with the things we make. For this story to be apparent to people, let alone meaningful, those involved with the design of a product should have a shared sense of the kind of experience they are trying to create. In the domain of digital products the story comes from asking the big questions: What’s the product or service about? What will it do for the customer? Where does it fit into their lives? In what ways might we create an emotional response the customer can walk away with?

How does a good story get built? With a theme, of course. Writers and filmmakers have been using themes to build stories for a very long time. They’re also not shy about designing explicitly for emotion and meaning. So why not designers? For us, a definition of the core value of experience can function as the theme that helps teams collectively build a more meaningful product. It’s the thing that can serve as a coordinating force behind the design. When the tangible elements of a product are all working together for the same purpose the product has a stronger story to tell. The theme is merely the thing that helps us deliver that story in the form of an experience.
”

October 7th 2009

Fred Beecher: Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process

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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.

Posted at 9:02am and tagged with: quote, design, user-interface-design, prototyping,.