January 11th, 2010
In the first two articles we discussed why you should consider creating prototypes and whether that prototype should have a role just in the design phase as a “Throwaway Prototype” versus an “Evolutionary Prototype” that may evolve into the final product.
While functional prototypes always involve development tools (and associated skills), there are, essentially, four classes of tool for creating user interface prototypes:
1. Pen and Paper
It doesn’t get any more low tech than this, which is great because it means that absolutely anyone can take part in the design process. User interface designs can be hand drawn or pre-prepared stocks of user interface elements can be laid out on a page.
Paper sketches can be produced very quickly but making alterations to a design can be somewhat difficult leading to repeated effort if a design needs to be restarted from scratch. It’s often best to spend more time thinking before committing pen to paper.
In test and review situations, Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: article, software prototyping
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December 17th, 2009
Reading Bill Buxton’s “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design” feels like leafing through a designer’s sketchbook, a sketchbook of a lifetime of contributing to designing high tech products. Ideas come at you from all angles and then drill down into incredible detail before spinning off in another direction.
Bill Buxton has worked at both EuroPARC and Xerox PARC, Silicon Graphics, Alias Wavefront and most recently Microsoft Research. He has been lecturing and writing on the human computer interaction for 30 years.
Buxton is passionate about technology products and equally passionate about the role of design in creating successful products which are a pleasure to use. He describes a role for design from the very earliest stages “sketching” new products and what interacting with them might be like. He describes how these sketches can be on paper, on glass, cut out of cardboard, in short videos, photomontages, post-its, games, pantomime, almost anything. He gives detailed examples of how these have been used to develop the user experience in numerous projects, many of which have developed into products.
A core message of the book is that the design process requires experimentation, with the expectation that experiments will fail and that the design team will learn a great deal from that failure. These experiments are often in the form of role playing, where members of the design team try to take on particular roles, trying to achieve particular aims within the limits of the current design experiment.
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Tags: book, lo-fi, Prototyping, review, sketching, user experience
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November 27th, 2009
GUI Design work involves a lot of mouse activity. Be more productive and reduce the strain by using keyboard alternatives where possible.
You can find most of the shortcut keys in the Help file by using the “Help | Keyboard Shortcuts” menu command.
Here’s a few more (some changed in version 3.5) that may not be listed in the help topic:
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Tags: GUI Design Studio, keyboard shortcuts, tips, tricks
Posted in GUI Design Studio, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »
November 26th, 2009
GUI Design Studio version 3.5 is now available for immediate download. This is a maintenance release with some fixes and changes based on customer requests. It’s a free upgrade for all registered users.
For customers using any prior version of GUI Design Studio, simply install the new version and your existing licenses will continue to work.
Tree Icons
Until now, Tree elements have come with just a couple of basic sets of icons and the only way to change individual item icons was to place other icons on top.
That worked well until scrolling and item expansion/contraction functionality was added in version 3.3. After that, you needed to jump through a few hoops with components to get custom tree icons working properly.
Well, we’ve finally given Tree items their own icon property so you can now select them directly and everything works as it should. For convenience, the icon selector also keeps a record of the 10 most recent icons for fast, one-click selection.
Other Changes
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Tags: GUI Design Studio, release
Posted in GUI Design Studio, Prototyping, Releases, User Interface Design | 1 Comment »
November 17th, 2009
In the first part of this article we discussed the difference between functional and user interface prototypes. In this one we’ll discuss whether your prototype should have a role beyond the discovery and design phase.
People often talk about “Throwaway Prototypes” versus “Evolutionary Prototypes” and it’s very important to understand the difference and exactly what type you are creating before you begin.
Throwaway Prototypes
A Throwaway Prototype, as the name suggests, forms no part of the final application. Its purpose is to prove (or disprove) a design and get approval for actual implementation.
It can be produced using any quick and dirty technique and the quality can even be quite poor, so long as it satisfies the requirements of identifying what’s right about a design, what’s wrong and what’s missing.
Because of the speed at which Throwaway Prototypes can be put together and changed (usually on-the-fly), they encourage feedback and continual revision until the design is about right.
Because the effort required to produce them is relatively small, Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: article, software prototyping
Posted in Articles, Prototyping | 5 Comments »
