Adaptive Path Blog

I did an interview with Bill Scott and Karon Weber a couple weeks ago discussing the content for their upcoming session at UX Week. It should be an intriguing session and I’m looking forward to hearing more about their experience. On a selfish note, as I’m doing a session on prototyping at UX Week as well, I was interested to see how critical having a working prototype was to their process and the success they achieved with their project.

I’m a big fan of prototyping. Over the last couple of years, I’ve accumulated more and reasons for this attitude. I’ve generated wireframes, I’ve developed from wireframes and I’ve developed from large specifications documents. Increasingly, the frustrations around these approaches have caught up with me. They have felt more and more like a set of old clothes that no longer quite fit. Assuming you are fortunate enough to have a process that allows some sort of iteration and collaboration between developers and designers, trying to collaborate with designers by passing wireframes back and forth is loaded with hidden costs. I like to think I can visualize with the best of them, but often the results of IxD or IA decisions don’t really become apparent until I am actually confronted with them in an interactive fashion. Even focusing purely on development concerns, there’s an entire class of problems that you never see until you’re halfway down the road to implementation. Prototypes, by pushing some form of implementation early, can help avoid unpleasant surprises late in your product development cycle.

Fortunately, it’s getting easier and easier. As Ajax settles in and becomes more common place, and as the front end developer talent pool deepens, it becomes easier to find people that can use a library of interaction scripts to mock up much more interactive html/css/javascript than before. There are open source frameworks that allow developers to build out entire applications in a fraction of the time it use to take. While these applications may not be suitable for a public launch, they are an excellent method for exploring the problem at hand in a way that all the interested stakeholders can immediately apprehend. There are also more and more 3rd party tools designed addressing this niche with varying degrees of robustness and effectiveness.

We’re on the rising curve of this trend. There are are plenty of contexts where wireframes themselves seem to be an adventurous leap of faith. Still, this is going to be an interesting area for growth both as we get better at creating prototypes and better at using processes that can take advantage of them.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Development, Upcoming Events, Web Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.