Category — Rapid Paper Prototyping

This blog post is the second in a series of two about scenarios of use as a usability method.

How to generate scenarios of use

Scenarios of use are not exceptionally difficult to craft, which makes them an attractive usability method.  Creating them, however, is easiest if you have a facilitator with strong communication and interpersonal skills—this helps boost group morale and creates an atmosphere that has a higher level of productivity.  When creating your scenarios of use, try to generate a number of scenarios that cover a wide range of circumstances, both positive and negative (the negative are called ‘misuse cases’).  You want to be sure to include misuse cases so you can investigate non-functional requirements such as the security and accessibility of your interface design.  You should go through all scenarios of use by yourself or with your group before you include stakeholders.

What are the 8 steps to developing scenarios of use?

According to Edward Kenworthy’s 1997 book Use Case Modeling: Capturing User Requirements the eight steps to developing scenarios of are:
1. Identify who is going to be using the website (this also works for other web-based, desktop-based or mobile applications).
2. Pick one of those actors.
3. Define what that actor wants to do on the site. Each thing the actor does on the site becomes a scenario of use.
4. For each scenario of use, decide on the normal course of events when that actor is using the site.
5. Describe the basic course in the scenario of use. Describe it in terms of what the actor does and what the system does in response that the actor should be aware of.
6. When the basic course is described, consider alternate courses of events and add those to “extend” the scenario of use.
7. Look for commonalities among the scenarios of use. Extract these and note them as common course scenario of use.
8. Repeat the steps 2 through 7 for all other actors.

What are the limitations of scenarios of use?

According to Alistair Cockburn, scenarios of use are an indispensable usability method, but they do not “take care of system design, user interface design, feature lists, or testing”.  Thus, scenarios of use can only assist you in laying the foundation for a great user interface design; scenarios of use help you hypothesize about your interface design, but they do not aid you in the actual feature design or edits of your prototype. Scenarios of use provide guidelines and suggestions only, but are still very useful because they help you identify the points in your interface design upon which you should focus design effort and subsequent usability tests.

This blog post is the second in a series of two about brainstorming as a usability method

How to conduct a brainstorming session

What you need for a brainstorming session

•    4-6 participants

•    Adequate location

•    A question to discuss

•    Note taking tools (paper, white board, word processor, markers, pens etc.)

•    Positivity—leave judgments and preconceived notions at the door!

So you learned what brainstorming is and why you should do it as a usability testing method from the first part of my blog post, but now you need to know how to do it. Before you begin your brainstorming session, you must first pick a question to present to the group or to yourself as an individual. The question should be neither too narrow nor too broad.  For example, brainstorming header fonts is too narrow and brainstorming on how to satisfy customers is too broad.  More appropriate questions would be: “What service for mobile phones is not available now, but needed?” or “What are some strategies for developing a new software usability test?”  Larger questions can be addressed but they should then be broken down into smaller brainstorming sessions.

You should also have a method for keeping track of ideas during a brainstorming session.  You can have post-it notes, a white board, or someone who types “meeting minutes” that can later be disseminated via email among participants.  It is important to talk and come up with ideas, but even more crucial to remember them!

Make sure to set some ground rules aimed specifically at reducing social inhibitions among participants while simultaneously increasing their creativity.  If you follow these four basic rules for brainstorming, you will be in good shape to achieve the aforementioned goals:

1.    Focus on the quantity of ideas produced: spreading the net as wide as possible increases the likelihood of producing a radical and effective solution.

2.    Withhold criticism: withholding criticism until the last stages of a brainstorming session is vital because early criticism can become a bottleneck hindering the flow of creativity.

3.    Encourage unusual ideas: suspend your assumptions and encourage the production of ideas that are not only unique, but also atypical.  This leads to an increased volume of ideas and a higher likelihood of an original solution.

4.    Combine ideas: you should encourage participants to combine their ideas as this will improve them and augment the sense of group solidarity.
Finally, if you are conducting a group brainstorming session, how do you select participants?  As a rule, you should select a heterogeneous group so that the diversity of generated ideas reflects the diversity of the thinkers.  Diverse participants can come from different careers, education levels, cultures, genders, and ages.  Diversity in participants cultivates diversity of ideas. However, sometimes you want to have group members who have a little more in common.  For example, if you are conducting a brainstorming session on software usability, you may want to ensure that there is a common link of technology and interface design knowledge among participants.

Docs users can also chat in real time with collaborators as they evaluate spreadsheets, proposals, and other written projects. MindMeister specializes on online mind mapping and allows users to create, edit and share mind maps very easily and collaborate on them in real-time. Pidoco offers its users real-time collaboration possibilities as they create wireframe prototypes of planned user interfaces for web, desktop or mobile applications, including applications for the iPhone or iPad. Pidoco users are able to send collaborators links to their wireframes for editing and user experience feedback purposes and for conducting usability tests to improve the user experience of applications. These and other applications underscore the importance of web interfaces design that keeps in mind usability and time-effective functionality.

From the range of tools now starting to offer real-time collaboration capabilities, it is apparent that this modern form of team work is becoming increasingly important, especially as globalization, cross-border cooperation and outsourcing intensify. While real-time collaboration is useful in such general settings as creating text or spreadsheet documents, it can be seen from the examples above that many specialized areas are discovering the advantages of it. Web interface design, for example requires active engagement and feedback. In order for designers to stay competitive and relevant in the world of web development, they need to have the ability to collaborate with colleagues, clients and users in the fastest way possible. And similar arguments can be applied to many other fields where individuals and businesses try to be innovative in their processes in order to remain competitive.

Our conclusion of Rapid Digital Prototyping: It’s got the look and feel of handmade scribble prototyping, but adds interactivity (making wireframes clickable) and enhances developing speed through re-usable elements and layers. Many (real-time) collaboration features enable interface designers to new ways to work with much better time allocation, leaving more time for the creative process that really counts.

The pidoco° wireframe software consists of three main modules which complement each other perfectly. They speed up the interface design process and optimize the general workflow in all stages of collaborative web design.

Interactive wireframes are quickly sketched with the Prototype Creator (just by drag&drop) and can later easily be shared and reviewed by colleagues, test users or clients. If there is need for even more in-depth feedback on individual aspects of the use cases, just use the digital prototypes to perform a easy to set up remote usability test where moderator and test user are connected remotely by a shared screen and an integrated phone. All modules are aimed to increase productivity of the interface design process and ease communication within the team.

Rapid Digital Prototyping (RDP)

Through prefab stencils (e.g. radio buttons, links, navigation items, controls etc.) interface designers can create clickable and animated web or software interfaces within minutes. Without any programming skills, interface designers can focus on the web concept and use cases, site structures and the overall layout of the site, instead of getting lost in details that only matter at a later stage of the project.

But even if screen designs have already been made in some hi-fi graphics software (e.g. InDesign, pidoco° can add value to the design process by bringing interactivity to static screens. Adding ‘click areas’ to the finished screenshots enhance the collaboration and interaction capabilities of a former static screenshot. Colleagues, clients and test users can now easily be integrated in the developers team and online discussions can be held. Just like web conferencing, but with real-time editing never seen before!

In May 2010 usability experts from all across Europe will gather in the buzzing hip city Berlin in Germany to talk about and share their thoughts on usability, user centered design and user experience.

After a very successful all German camp in 2009 the organization committee decided to go international, inviting interesting speakers and participants from all over Europe. More than 15 Country Ambassadors from 13 countries are currently under way to promote this usability event in their local (national) UX circles.

In addition to the more general topics like usability research, user centric product design and marketing in relation to user experience, the key topics of this year’s leading usability event will be:

- Information Architecture
- Interaction Design
- Usability Engineering
- Visual Design
- Prototype Engineering

It will be interesting, inspiring and fun! When you have never been part of a BarCamp, let me drop one or two sentences about what’s going on there. This sort of event tries to break with ex-cathedra teaching like one speaker stand in front of a class telling “the truth”. It’s more like a large workshop type event where there are no spectators, but just active participants. That does not mean that you have to prepare a workshop session (but you might if you want) but that you should prepare yourself a bit before attending the sessions you decided to be part of.

Everybody is invited to take part in discussions, post questions, contribute ideas and be critical on topics and other people’s opinions, since the core value of such an event is that different ideas and backgrounds meet, creating something new, bigger and better. It’s supposed to be an overall learning experience where everybody profits from the other attendee’s knowledge and experience.

And since you are part of the UXcamp, everybody would be happy when you take action beyond just the venue itself. Spread the word and mention the event in your blog, among your peers, take photos to post later on flickr and get in touch with the other campers before, during or after the event.

Looking forward to see you there!

More info at: www.uxcampeurope.org

For the people who are into screen design, Rapid Paper Prototyping is old school! But ever considered doing screen design on screen?

With pidoco’s web-based prototyping software, interaction designers and web developers can save valuable time, enhance the creative process and build better usability for the WWW.

Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been known to be the solution to get a website started. The basic concepts of the layout will be put on paper and discussed within the team. This prototype will then be put through a refinement process by incorporating feedback from different stake holders. This paper prototype will at last act as a rough guide for the whole project – from start to finish. Some screen-designers even use these paper sketches for running usability tests. Revealing usability issues in the prototyping phase can save a lot of time, since later alterations in the so called ‘finished’ web project are minimized.

Anyway, there are some drawbacks to Rapid Paper Prototyping.  Paper prototypes are only scanned to add to the project documentation and also difficult to collaborate on in larger teams. Scanning paper prototypes and making them ‘clickable’ for testing use cases is also a time consuming task as we all know!

That is why many screen designers create their prototypes directly in MS PowerPoint or other diagramming tools and have them send to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the sketches more effectively but it is not really more interactive than copying a piece of paper handing it to colleagues. The digital sketches still do not show the real capabilities for test user excitement:  links, dynamic menus and combo-boxes etc. cannot be reproduced effectively and need to be explained individually in long text. Again, more time and effort has to be invested to get the message across.
pidoco° has spotted this problem and made it their mission to tackle it by providing a fast web-based interface design software.

Our conclusion of Rapid Digital Prototyping: It’s got the look and feel of handmade scribble prototyping, but adds interactivity (making wireframes clickable) and accelerates developing speed through re-usable elements and layers. Many (real-time) collaboration components enable interface designers to new ways to work with higher efficiency, leaving more time for the creative process that really counts.

But even if screen designs have already been made in some high-fidelity graphics software (e.g. InDesign, pidoco° can add value to the work flows by bringing interactivity to static screens. Adding ‘click areas’ to the finished screenshots enhance the collaboration and interaction capabilities of a former static screenshot. Colleagues, clients and test users can now easily be integrated in the designs process and online discussions can be held. Just like web conferencing, but with real-time editing never seen before!