How better to learn about design than by chucking a raw egg over a balcony? Besides being a highly exhilarating release (Weeeee! SPLAT!), it also turns out to be a great hands-on way to teach basic design principles to kids. My Adaptive Path mate Ljuba Miljkovic and I just tried it out with two fantastic 12 year-olds (Thanks, ladies!), and it went something like this…
Last summer our San Francisco studio realized it had a problem. Our fussy upstairs refrigerator wouldn't latch every time it was closed.
Several years ago I wrote about the virtues of Keynote as a prototyping tool. In a nutshell: it’s fast, it doesn’t require code writing, and you can turn it into flash and present it over the web.
This week I was shocked with the inventive but pragmatic application of Keynote as a prototyping tool for iPad. See Amir Khella here using Keynote to prototype a realistic iPad application, and (if you skip ahead in the video) run it on the iPad:
Here’s more about how he did it.
Such a good way to test out your concepts…
Can you imagine an alternate reality? We talk about alternate reality games, but what if an alternate reality exists for others on a day to day basis. Take a second and imagine what it would be like if you couldn’t’ think in the abstract, but instead had a brain that thought by referencing tons of concrete images. Like if we said “think of a church steeple”, and you thought of lots of examples from around the world of church steeples—instead of just a general church steeple. At UX Week this year, Temple Grandin, Professor of Animal Sciences at…
By our talented summer associate, Chris A. Wronski
Firstly, let me take a moment to introduce myself. I’m a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design shooting for the first degree in the United States in a service design program. This summer I had the extraordinary opportunity to work alongside the Adaptive Path staff in San Francisco and gain priceless insights into practices and approaches that, unfortunately, are hard to find elsewhere.
One of the topics that has been on my mind for the past few months, continues to come up in conversation, and seems to consistently…
Earlier this year I wrote about the value of prototyping. Along with my thoughts on why and how to create effective design prototypes, I listed some rapid prototyping tools. My hope was to offer non-technical folks in the UX field the inspiration and the means to create something interactive instead of a standard wireframe and visual design comp.
I’ve been overwhelmed by the response to the original post. Sixty of you offered suggestions for additional tools and techniques. In the months following I’ve collected these, and found a few of my own. The list of rapid prototyping tools…
If you’re trying to get a better experience out in the world, the best proof of your ideas is probably just doing it. It can take months and years to plan, spec, and align organizational bureaucracies around a strange new idea. But making your idea concrete enough to be used by real people can remove obstacles, win hearts, and create real traction.
The San Francisco city government is like other governments, not particularly known for its speed and nimbleness. But recently they’ve discovered the power of calling projects “pilots” to eschew the normal policies and procedures in favor…
Will we look back on the desktop experience of today in much the same way we reflect on computer punch cards of yore? If so, when will the desktop and mouse become irrelevant? How do people who want to explore the world of technology experiences that are free from the tethers of the keyboard and mouse begin?
These along with a host of other thought-provoking questions were among the topics of discussion, debate, and jest at last week’s Beyond the Desktop panel discussion. I was honored to be in the company of six brave and talented designers who are…
Newsletter readers: jump straight down to the list of tools.
Prototypes as a design deliverable are on the rise, and for good reason. I am strong believer that prototyping helps us to design better experiences. We are working in a world of rich, dynamic interfaces, both on the web and on our devices. The experiences we design are interactive, responsive, and have emotion. Prototypes allow us to articulate the feeling and function of a design in a way that a wireframe does not. But how do you select the best prototyping tool for the job?
Making Effective Prototypes
In order…
Fidelity is an on-going conversation in the area of prototyping. Varying levels of design fidelity elicit different reactions from project stakeholders: clients, research participants, and developers. Sometimes a low-fidelity prototype will allow stakeholders to be more generative and imaginative in their responses. Sometimes it will just confuse them. Sometimes a hi-fidelity prototype will allow stakeholders to accurately understand the design experience, sometimes it will cause them to be especially anxious about a detail like the colour.
Given our awareness of the prototype-fidelity issue, we, as designers, often times make quite strategic choices in determining the fidelity of a particular prototype…