Reading seminar 2 - Niklas Gustavsson

Reading seminar 2 - Niklas Gustavsson

This weeks reading seminar was about creating concepts (through brainstorming for example), refining your concepts using different “laws”, documentation  and a plethora of other ways of doing this, and then lastly about prototyping.

We have already gone through the brainstorming part, where we as a team sat together and went through a whole lot of brainstorming. We were all familiar with this concept seeing we have read a course very similar to this one, so we all got it done - and got a whole lot of concepts out. The thing we did differently was that we subconsciously did the second part, the refining - without knowing about all these laws and storyboards and such, and we went straight to the prototyping part. Now that we have more information about (researched) facts about user design, we might have to take one step back and go through all the laws as a group, and refine our concept a little bit more.

One law that stuck out to me was Hick’s law, about how many options a user processes, this one is essential for us seeing we are designing an application with several options. We might have to reconsider where we want to put the options in order to not confuse the user, or give the user to much information at once. The magic number seven is something we could use. In this process we should also use a wireframe, which I felt was essential in a software type product.

And after we have gone through all of these steps, we need to go back to the prototyping (which we already started on) in order to optimize and let people test our product. User tests are really important, as it shows our product in use - and a user will be able to tell us what works, and what can be tweaked upon. And once we have that information, we could do several steps over again, to eventually do another user test - to optimize our product. Something like this:

When we did the prototyping last time, we went straight for the high-fidelity prototype, and I feel that this one is the one that suits us the most - it does not take a whole lot of time, and it represents our software better than a paper version or a physical version. And once we have done more prototypes and user tests, we might move on to an even higher-fidelity prototype with an actual web-based application.

Question for the seminar: How do you know which one of the concepts you get from brainstorming to pursue?