Prototyping

We got a really good idea of tracking the visitors movements at the museum so they manager can use that data to optimize and evaluate their exhibitions. If we are going to prototype something like this , as we started doing at the last exercise we need to choose one method to show what our product will turn out to be.

Chapter 11 is talking about how prototyping should be used. They divide prototyping into different types, high and low fidelity prototyping.

High fidelity prototyping is when your prototype is as close it should be to a real product with a realistic design. The advantages with a high end prototype is that it could be used as a good sale argument there the user can get a real feel of what the product will be like. Thus this can also be a problem when the user expects this to be the real product. For example with software programs the code, could be terrible and bugs may appear as it isn’t tested as it should.

Low fidelity prototyping is for example when your prototype appears only on paper or some simple material that is not a real program. This could be used to see what to user expects from the program and to prove that the product is needed as it could wake up needs that the user didn't realized he had.

For our project we should focus on something in between, the author of beyond human computer interaction suggest that a power point presentation is right between high and low fidelity prototyping. Thus you get a feel for what the product would look like in clean text and on a computer and it’s not that expensive or time consuming as a high end prototype could be. I think this could be the best way to go when prototyping our product because of the time limit and non-existing budget.

We should also develop our prototype as an iterative work in progress so we can build a steady ground for our final project. With this approach we could also determine pros and cons with our idea and get a good grip of what we could improve. 

We should also use our previous work, interviews target group and field studies when we are developing our project. By now we have a pretty good grip of what the needs is and what target group we should focus on. This gives us a good conceptual model that can be the base on when we are developing our product. Thus we need to print in text what exactly our conceptual model is.

If we decide to focus on our idea with tracking people at the museum our prototype won’t need that much of direct interaction with the user, of course different bottoms and clickable stuff needs to respond to the user. We should focus on the user’s exploring throughout the program and what the user would like to see is very important here.

The scenarios we came up with last week should also be applied when we do our prototype. We could apply new scenarios with our existing personas.  

So my question is

• What prototyping model should we use and we should really put our conceptual model into text so we can lay a steady foundation to our prototype.