In many ways, the most creative challenging and under-appreciated aspect of interaction design is evaluating designs with people. The insights that you’ll get from testing designs with people can help you get new ideas, make changes, decide wisely and fix bugs. One reason I think design is such an interesting field is its relationship to truth and objectivity. I find design so incredibly fascinating because we can say more in response to a question like: “ How can we measure success ?” than “It’s just personal preference” or “Whatever feels right.” At the same time the answers are more complex and more open-ended, more subjective and require more wisdom than just a number like 7 or 3. One of the things that we’re going to learn is the different kinds of knowledge that you can get out of different kinds of methods. Why evaluate designs with people? Why learn about how people use interactive systems? One major reason for this is that it can be difficul...
A prototype is the best place to start building your project. I’ll introduce you to the meaning of prototyping and why I think it is so tremendously important. This is going to serve as a framing for later that we’ll use to introduce concrete techniques. Today when we talk about prototyping, what we mean is rapidly creating an approximation of a design idea so that you can quickly get feedback and learn. Prototyping is the pivotal activity in structured innovation, collaboration and creativity in design. Prototypes embody design hypotheses and enable designers to get feedback. It’s what Donald Schon calls “ a reflective conversation with materials ”.By trying things out and learning from that exploration you are able to improve your design and be able to gain insights that you otherwise may not have. It’s important to remember that the goal in prototyping is not the artifact it’s feedback : Build some prototypes, try them out, and usually you’d learn to try t...