- Week 9 -
Prototyping & Designing Interactions
The material this week gave me language for things I constantly experience as a designer. I’m very grateful for this, and I know it will help me in both my academic and professional life. It touches on so many points we need to be aware of when handling a project, and I feel every designer would benefit from these materials—no matter the level or industry. These are all things we will address in one way or another. From adjusting our explanatory approach depending on our stakeholders, to defining the purpose, focus, and scope of a prototype, to actually building a good prototype.
I’ll share some of my main takeaways:
A prototype is a tool for exploring and expressing ideas in the design process of interactive digital systems.
Prototypes represent different states of an evolving design and serve to explore options.
Examine design problems and evaluate solutions.
In the early phases of a project, it can be challenging, or even impossible, to build complete prototypes of the entire design.
Choosing the appropriate, more focused prototype to build is an art in itself, and clearly communicating its purposes to different audiences is a crucial part of effectively using it.
The ways that we talk, and even think about prototypes, can get in the way of their effective use.
Focusing on a prototype’s attributes like the tools used to make it or how polished it looks or behaves can divert both us and our audience from what truly matters.
We should direct our attention to the fundamental questions surrounding the interactive system being designed:
What role will the artifact play in a user’s life? How should it look and feel? How should it be implemented?
Challenges in communicating prototypes:
Prototypes are not self-explanatory
Audience of prototypes
Limited understanding of design practices
organizations develop their own “prototyping cultures”
Multidisciplinary teamwork
Complexity of interactive systems
variety of software, hardware, auditory, visual, and interactive features.
Interactions are enabled by good engineering
But it's interaction design that makes them usable, useful, and fun.
We suffer from poor interaction design all around us.
What is an interaction?
The exchange between a person and a system.
The behavior of a product.
A user’s action triggers a response from the artifact.
Designers are advocates for end users
Interaction design shapes experience
It’s not just about how something works, but how it feels to use it
Good interaction design anticipates human behavior
Products without an emotional component are lifeless and do not connect with people
Emotion needs to be thoughtfully included in design decisions.
Any particular prototype doesn't necessarily represent the solution, only a
solution.
Overall, this week’s material made me reflect on how often we do things intuitively because we know they work, or because we’ve adopted certain processes from our workplace. But being able to actually understand these principles allows us to identify areas of opportunity, create room for growth, and better adapt to different scenarios.
Readings:
- Dan Saffer, Designing for Interaction I
- Houde & Hill, What do Prototypes Prototype?
- Hanington & Martin, Universal Methods of Design
Videos:
- Prototyping (NYU Stream, Zoom Recording)
- Brainstorming & Ideation Activity (slides here) (NYU Stream, Zoom Recording)