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IA Summit ’10 Part Three: Prototyping

April 12th, 2010

Information Architecture, User Experience Design

Building on my previous post, my second topic-of-interest at this year’s IA Summit is prototyping. I’m very interested in this topic because I’ve experienced, first hand, the mental leap needed when reviewing static images that attempt to convey dynamic, on-page behavior…it often involves a significant number of static pages, with text explaining the motion and interaction rules, and a lot of client review time. It is situations like these for which I’m most interested in presenting dynamic prototypes in the future.

While at the conference several sessions and conversations focused in the idea of prototyping in-general:

Kevin Wick shared insights on his organization’s transition from static wireframes to dynamic prototypes (in his case, created using Axure). His talk, structured as a timeline beginning with obtaining executive buy-in and ending with the current state of routine project prototyping, provided best practices and pitfalls to avoid. Some of the most important points included:

• Though it may (or may not) take more time to create dynamic Axure prototypes than static wireframes, client review time and functional specification creation will likely be reduced, which could result in as much as a 10% net cost reduction.
• It’s important to determine, at the beginning of any wireframing/prototyping phase, exactly what needs to be shown in the dynamic prototype. You may want to focus a dynamic prototype on a small number of dynamic page components rather than attempting to prototype an entire site in the tool.
• It’s also important to define exactly how deep any prototyped feature will go.
• When showing pages for which some features may be dynamic (and built out in the prototype) and others are not, somehow indicate prototyped elements (especially if others may be exploring the prototype on their own).
• Dynamic prototypes may not be appropriate for all types of projects.
• Fred Beecher led a lunch discussion about the different ways organizations can use prototyping, and the different tools that can be used. Axure, Balsamiq and Flash were all discussed as options for User Experience Designers / Information Architects who are light programming experience.