Hello David, I wholeheartedly agree that prototypes are an essential design tool. We often do paper prototypes of our designs, or "spike" prototypes to test out a particular user interaction within a design. However, I still have trouble fitting my head around how I could make a prototype for the kind of application we are making at my company.
For example, we have two major software clients that are used together on our platform. One is for the shippers (who have goods that need to be shipped), and the other is for the carriers (who have the trucks to ship the goods). One shipper can have anywhere from 30 - 200 carriers connected to their client, and a carrier can have anywhere from 1-20 shippers connected to theirs. The basic way the platform works is that a shipper places items (5 - 100 per day) on the platform using their client. Their carriers can then view these items and make bids on them. After receiving a number of bids (e.g. 10), our customers will accept one of them. The platform then sends out acceptance and rejection messages. The interaction design for such software is incredibly interesting. There are 3 different panes in the screen display for each each client (1 for notifications and contact data, 1 for the different categories of item listings, and 1 to display the details of the currently selected item), with 2-6 tabs associated with each of the panes. There are also a large number of business rules surrounding who can view a given item, which information is available to different classes of users, and processes for notification and cancellation, etc. But I really have no idea how to prototype it (in a reasonable amount of time :-), let alone in a way that can be used as specifications for developers. Any suggestions? I have to admit that I am really not all that skilled in prototyping at the moment. I have very limited programming skills and generally stick to click through HTML pages, but I don't think that is the problem in this case. Currently we simply show series of screenshots + descriptions to describe user interactions to developers. We also use paper prototypes to work through very basic interactions, but have found that paper prototypes are pretty useless in testing large scale (10+ users) user interaction with the system which should support an average of 50, and up to 200 users. - Liz > . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Posted from the improved ixda.org > http://beta.ixda.org/discuss?post=20109 > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > List Guidelines ............ http://beta.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://beta.ixda.org/help > Unsubscribe ................ http://beta.ixda.org/unsubscribe > Questions .................. [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Home ....................... http://beta.ixda.org > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
