14. “Find the quickest path
to experience.”
“Doing is the best kind of thinking.”
Tom Chi
15.
16.
17. “The sketch is not the end goal. The end
goal of the drawing process is what you
learn while sketching. So don’t worry if
you can’t sketch.”
Joshua Brewer – “Sketch, Sketch, Sketch”
23. “Learning from sketches is based largely on the ambiguous
nature of their representation. That is, they do not specify
everything and lend themselves to, and encourage, various
interpretations that were not consciously integrated into
them by their creator.”
Bill Buxton – “Sketching User Experiences”
Context for my prototyping experiences.
Core teams are important to our process because they create co-ownership and a shared understanding of the product
UX does a little PM
Dev does a little UX
PM is the CEO of the product and has the final say.
The canvas for understanding our product work is often a story map. It’s a journey through the problem we are trying to solve, from the perspective of our customer.
Broken down into Goals – tasks and features.
Next we carve out a section we can execute quickly, is technically feasible, and answers the “would they use it” question.
"If Google Docs and Post It Notes had a kid, it would look like CardBoard"
Now that we have defined MVP prototyping can begin.
So, why do we prototype?
Fail early and inexpensively – Real innovation always includes a risk of failure. Thomas Edison once joked, “We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb.” By building a prototype, you can quickly weed out the approaches that don’t work to focus on the ones that do.
Quickly iterate
----- Meeting Notes (5/6/14 13:46) -----
If you asked a user - they will tell you a faster horse
If have to read between the lines - look for the yummy sound
Will your idea work?
Two major research questions that prototypes can answer.
This is where fidelity plays a role.
Related to fidelity is the scope of prototype
Horizontal – display a wide range of features but without fully implementing all of those features;
Vertical – focus on implementing a small set of features in a nearly-complete fashion
TRANS to Sketching: More about higher fidelity later (with some examples), let’s start with the lowest fidelity …..
Lead experience team defining new strategic opportunities for Google via rapid experimentation and productization. Specialized in rapid prototyping, product development and strategy, contributing to several projects and filing 41 patents. Hired several dozen folks to staff UX/ME/ID for the division.
Curently running ‘X’
Building a team and meta-team that can build anything in the world. Looking for makers of all sorts (software, hardware, mechanical, digital design, product design) for engagements from 2 days to 2 months, but mostly starting with intense 1-2 day engagements with awesome contract rates.
Assuage fear and build confidence by just making some marks
Draw some lines
Draw some squares
Draw circles
Draw triangles
How to represent blocks of text
How to represent pictures
STOP and practice
Joshua Brewer notes in “Sketch, Sketch, Sketch”:
Pick an idea from the “hat” and sketch a solution (or more than one)
STOP and sketch 15 minutes
use your neighbor to test your design – 15 minutes
DISCUSS
So, why do we prototype?
Fail early and inexpensively – Real innovation always includes a risk of failure. Thomas Edison once joked, “We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb.” By building a prototype, you can quickly weed out the approaches that don’t work to focus on the ones that do.
Quickly iterate
----- Meeting Notes (5/6/14 13:46) -----
If you asked a user - they will tell you a faster horse
If have to read between the lines - look for the yummy sound
Bill Buxton says in Sketching User Experiences:
Tool range from DYI simple interfaces, and to complex offerings like REDAYconfirm?
Why "Balsamiq"?#
Balsamic vinegar, the high-end, aged for 25+ year kind, has a lot in common with what we want our software to be: rich, smooth, pleasurable, expensive. OK our software is actually pretty affordable but we still want it to feel like a treat! :)
Like a fine balsamic vinegar, our software adds flavor to something else (in our case wikis and bug trackers), requires craftmanship and is made in Italy!
Pencil in an opensource GUI prototyping and sketching tools, developed by Evolus based on Mozilla technologies. This tools greatly help business analysts and GUI developers quickly draw GUI of applications to prepare proposal documents for clients to collect requirements, and for developer as a base document about GUI.
Pencil project is one of the effort Evolus to contribute back to the community. Therefore, Pencil is released under an opensource license (GPL) so everyone can have opportunities to use, access to source code for modification and upgrade.
Axure is free and comes with Axshare, an online web server.
Axure is good for low fidelity and high fidelity prototypes. Also is great for mobile when used with Axshare.
Similar to Flinto but with lots of collaboration tools. Maybe for remote teams. Live mark-up, etc.
Online drag and drop
Like a browser-based Axure
How they don’t get sued by Axure – not sure. Some extra gesture support fo mobile but steeper learning curve.
Not good for responsive because of fixed break points
Theoretically usable code. Better than most but seems like a beta application
Dev folks might be interested on this. Not sure if the code can be used,
Remember the core team? They spearhead the discovery.
PM spends about 80% of time on discovery and Dev about 20%
Interviewed about 20 small business owners
Ask the same 10 questions
how did you get started
describe a typical day
describe your hiring process
where do you see yourself in 5 years?
how do you use your mobile device
Took a picture
Put our notes on cards and centrally located the board near the team so they could get to know them
Next we looked at the data from our interviews and identified four main categories of attributes: Personal Back Ground, Store Operations, Posting/Interviews Practices, Hiring Practices
Within each category, we found five attributes that spanned a range of two extremes.
For example – Technology IQ – low on one end and expert on the other or Power Role – very controlling one on end and dependent on other partners and employees on the other.
Then we plotted each interview along the continuum for each attribute. As we did this, patterns formed and from hos patterns emerged personas.
We had persona cards made and handed them out
Most importantly, we used Brendan in stories so team members and stakeholder could visualize the customers.
Also created a shared understanding across the team of our customer’s goals and frustrations.
It help senior leaders understand the vision of our product ideas.