For Saturday, June 21

For next week:

  • From verbal and written feedback, iterate on your wireframes and app map and produce paper or digital prototype using Flinto (http://flinto.com). Your prototypes should still be low fidelity and black and white; simply take your current wireframes to the next level of thinking. Use real content that will help people be able to accomplish a full task. Post a link to your prototype or pictures/scans of your paper prototypes to the blog.
  • Iterate on your app map and post it to the blog as well. During prototyping, each person will have time for one on one time with Drew.
  • Be prepared to document your prototyping with photos and notes.

 

Further thoughts on prototyping for next week:

Paper prototypes are a simulation of a digital interface with a paper. When paper prototyping, you print or draw your interface and have a tester interact with the paper like is a real, digital interface. You will play the part of the iPhone’s processor, moving things and performing actions that the phone would do. Paper prototyping is a way to quickly and with little effort test out our designs.

Tips for paper prototypes:

  • Print out your mocks at a true to iPhone size.
  • If your app requires content (recipes, restaurants, etc.), you’ll want to provide your user with those. If you want someone to take a picture, have a separate cutout of a picture to throw onto the screen.
  • If you need the user to type, you may want to have a iPhone keyboard to put on top of your interface. This may be a good way to test if your interface needs to adjust in any way for the keyboard as well.

An equally useful approach would be a low fidelity digital prototype. For next week if you use this approach, you should use Flinto (http://flinto.com), but in the future, you could explore Keynote, interactive PDFs, HTML/CSS, Xcode storyboards, etc. If you use flint, you should have people test on a phone, not on a computer.

Whether you use create a paper or digital prototype when testing, you should spend the majority of your time observing and listening.

  • Provide them with one or more tasks to accomplish in the app. For example, if you are making a recipe book app. Ask your test to find a recipe that they want to make for dinner tonight. If you’re exploring a shopping list feature, perhaps you’d task them with making a plan for their shopping trip that evening. You can also ask more direct questions, such as “Do you know how to add an ingredient in a recipe to a shopping list?”
  • If your tester asks where certain functionality is, try to redirect and have them try and discover the functionality. Perhaps you’ll Perhaps they will show you functionality you hadn’t imagined.
  • Do not defend or explain your choices. Just absorb their responses and behavior. Often what people do is more valuable than what they say.
  • After observing, ask them for how they think the app could be made better.