Please click through, theres some really good insight into what actually goes on in prototype and development of products.  And the new Tony Hawk RIDE controller was sure no easy task.

Trackballs, arcade pushbuttons, Wii remote-sized holes: Robomodo reveals how it designed a deck

“We have, like, a graveyard of skateboard prototypes here,” says Robomodo’s Patrick Dwyer in a half-joking sort of way.

via In Pictures: How the RIDE team built a board | Game Development | News by Develop.

Just about all developers work by iterating in one way or another.

The biggest problem isn’t that you have to change things that are already done, or even throw it away. The biggest issue is that it takes time, and time is pretty much always more precious than money. That’s why the designer can save a lot of time by iterating in the pre-development phase, so he doesn’t waste the whole team’s time.

Iteration means the act of repeating and it’s what we do to make really good games. We make something, look at it and then we notice what we can change to make it better, or maybe even something that doesn’t work as intended at all and “must” be fixed.

Doing this late in the development cycle can be tricky, hard and expensive, as it might require effort from very many team members from different disciplines. Of course, it depends on what you’re about to change. Some minor tweaking might not be a big deal.

Sure, people in the team might whine a bit when changes are to be made because they think that it’s either good enough as it is, the designer should have “known” about the result in advance or just because they don’t want to throw away work that’s already done, but leaving that aside, the biggest issue is time. You’re always working towards deadlines and time equals money.

That’s why it’s important for designers to iterate when only being in the pre-development and theoretical design. Write the design and then make sure that all design-ish people analyze it with a microscope and iterate, iterate and iterate!

That’s a great thing about prototypes as well. They’re built for you to be able to try out things in and make rapid changes. Use them! Unfortunately, not all projects use prototyping, which I think is a real shame. It doesn’t have to be a massive fully playable game.

Heck, it doesn’t even have to be digital.

A prototype can be anything that let you test anything, like a small, small element of a game mechanic, interaction design, or whatever. I think it’s worth dedicating and spending time on prototypes even if it “steals” time from the actual development, because in the end, you’ll save time and turn up with a better product.

Also, try and keep alert so you can make changes in good time, instead of waiting untill the last minute. The less work done to be changed/discarded, the better. And as a designer, dare to say that something doesn’t work right, instead of waiting for someone else to notice it. It doesn’t matter if you become the bitchy one because you’re always the one to point out the “bad” stuff.

Making games is just like making anything else. Let’s say you’re gonna draw a panda. If you draw a panda and you’ve never done that before, you’ll get a result. Now, afterwards, draw another one. Odds are that the second one will look better.

But in the end, you’ll run out of time and can’t iterate anymore. Except if you’re Blizzard, then you can iterative untill you’re satisfied and release globally loved games.

Because the time is limited, it’s important to make sure that iteration cost as little time as possible. That’s why it’s a good idea to start iterating from day one as a designer.

If I were to save this post as a draft, read it a couple of times and then re-write it, I’m 100% sure I would end up with a much better text.

Recently stumbled across Johnny Holland, a great new interaction design site.  Amongst all their good stuff is this clip, which is proof that anybody can prototype and bring an idea to life.  This young fella knows what he wants his ‘thing’ to do and how it is going to do the doing.

Da qualche mese mi frulla in testa la possibilità di inserire nel team di User Experience anche un front-end developer che si occupa di realizzare prototipi funzionali in vero XHTM/CSS in modo da utilizzare la base per il vero sviluppo.

Questa scelta ha delle ripercussioni economiche sul budget del dipartimento. Potrebbe allungare i tempi di realizzazione dei prototipi, anche se sarebbero recuperati in fase di sviluppo. Purtroppo il prototipo spesso serve in tempi più rapidi in quanto lo usiamo anche come documento che il Cliente deve approvare e non solo come parte del progetto da consegnare agli sviluppatori per il coding.

Oggi consiglio vivamente l’utilizzo di Axure RP a chiunque voglia affrontare la realizzazione di prototipi. E’ uno strumento potete e veloce. Abbiamo sviluppato una serie di “componenti” che simulano interazioni avanzate per dare il senso reale dell’attività che una persona svolge. Axure ha un suo sistema interno per generare e far funzionare questi widget. Ecco qualche esempio.

Insomma, la mia idea di creare dei prototipi XHTML/CSS validi si stava dilatando perché sarei stato costretto a lavorare a colpi di jQuery e DOM Scripting per raggiungere gli stessi risultati. Poi ho trovato IxEdit.

Un video è meglio di tante parole. Ecco come IxEdit potrebbe aiutarmi a realizzare prototipi in codice valido mantenendo la possibilità di realizzare rapidamente alcune interazioni. Senza scrivere codice.

L’ho scaricato. Devo studiarlo meglio.

mbed is a next-generation 32-bit microcontroller platform. It’s a prototyping and teaching tool somewhat along the lines of Arduino. On steroids. With claws and fangs. Other contenders in this class include the MAKE Controller, STM32 Primer and Primer 2, Freescale Tower, and Microchip’s PIC32 Starter Kit. The mbed hardware has a number of advantages (and a few disadvantages) compared to these other platforms, but what really sets it apart is the development environment: the entire system — editor, compiler, libraries and reference materials — are completely web-based. There is no software to install or maintain on the host system.

The Hardware

The mbed board is sensibly priced at $60; about middle of the road among its peers. mbed’s size (or lack thereof) is among its greatest assets, measuring only about 1″ by 2″ (26 x 52mm) in a stout 40-pin DIP package that just barely manages to fit in a breadboard…a major win.

The top of the board is dominated by the microcontroller itself: a 60MHz NXP LPC1768 based on the eminently capable 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 core, sporting 64K of RAM and 512K flash, and rounded out with an embarrassment of peripheral riches: Ethernet, USB (host, device, and to-go), CAN bus, multiple serial, I2C and SPI buses, 12-bit A/D and even a 10-bit D/A converter and realtime clock/calendar. Also on top is the USB connector (mini-B), some power regulation circuitry (operating on 4.5 to 9 volts DC, or USB power), several indicator LEDs, and the reset button (a plain vanilla tactile switch on our purchased unit, not the candy-like blue button seen in product shots).

The underside conceals an Ethernet transceiver chip (requiring only the addition of an RJ45 jack to get the board on a network) and a DiskOnChip-style component that provides a small (about 2MB) FAT filesystem when attached to a host system through USB, much like a thumb drive.

This latter feature — the FAT filesystem — is half of the key to mbed’s software-free, cross-platform magic. Getting new code onto the device is simply a matter of copying the compiled program (as a .bin file) to this drive. Press the reset button, and the new code is copied to the MCU’s internal flash and run. No special programming hardware dongle, no special bootloader software, just drag and drop. This has some serious implications. Pretty much any system these days can mount a FAT filesystem. We’re not just talking about getting Mac and Linux users into the fold alongside Windows…there’s also the impending wave of featherweight netbooks with ARM and VIA chips running peculiar, instant-on operating systems. Or the OLPC XO-1. Or older PowerPC Macs. The computers in the school’s lab that you’re not allowed to install any software on. Game consoles.

The Software

“Cloud computing” is still the hot buzzword this week, and the mbed project has adopted the concept wholeheartedly, comprising the other half of their softwareless strategy. Everything with mbed — everything, even your own source code — resides on their servers and is accessed through a web browser. This carries with it all of the good and bad points of any other network-based service such as Google Docs. There’s the potential for this to be a fantastic tool for teaching and collaboration, and in fact they’ve created such an online community for mbed, with forums and publicly-shareable code libraries. One can move between home and office, or travel around the world, and resume editing code on any system with a solid ’net connection. No need to check for software updates; the server will always be current.

mbed programs are written in C++ (yes, thankfully it’s “programs” and “C++,” not “sketches” or “the mbed language”) using their JavaScript-based online editor. When ready, click the Compile button. The compiler and linker run on the back end, on the server at the other end of the network connection. Provided your code is all syntactically valid, a compiled .bin file will then be downloaded to your computer…save this to the mbed USB disk, press the reset button, and you’re good to go. In Arduino-like fashion, the mbed device also appears as a virtual COM port, so you can monitor a program’s serial output using any terminal program.

The Good

We were taught that you should always say something kind before criticizing, so we’ll point out that the above process does, in fact, work exceedingly well, and has proved to be both quick and reliable. Once you get into the groove, the sequence of operations is no more onerous than with Arduino or any other microcontroller-specific programmer dongle.

To their credit, unlike some microcontroller evaluation kits, there are no artificial limitations to the mbed compiler; the full code and memory space of the processor is available to your code. The editor has realtime syntax coloring and multiple undo levels. And double-clicking on an error message in the compiler output will take you directly to the offending line, as in any decent IDE. You can import existing code from your local system to the mbed “cloud,” or likewise export individual files or an entire project. All good stuff.

The real saving grace of this setup is the libraries, both the official functions in what they call the “Handbook,” and community-contributed code in the “Cookbook.” A tremendous amount of functionality has been implemented in a concise and usually object-oriented manner. It’s almost comical sometimes, after having worked with other microcontrollers and girding for some expected coding nightmare, only to find that the corresponding library handles a task in a couple of lines (browse through the Handbook and Cookbook for examples). There’s a tendency also to follow stdlib or “UNIX-like” conventions for file access, character I/O, realtime clock access, etc., so existing systems programmers new to microcontrollers will feel right at home, no weird function names or syntaxes.

The mbed’s FAT filesystem is also accessible to the microcontroller, making it useful for more than just program storage. Web pages can be served from this space, or a data logging program can store results here. If the two megabyte capacity is too limiting for your needs, have a look at the SDCard library in the Cookbook — it’s almost trivial to wire up and use. Pretty much all of the libraries are like that!

The Bad and the Ugly

Hardware-wise, there are just a few minor nitpicks:

First is with the local FAT filesystem. Even though this is one of the device’s most unique features, and the very thing that enables its platform neutrality, the implementation just seems a bit anachronistic. The aforementioned SDCard library demonstrates how readily that format can be used. It’s faster, with the potential for far greater capacity, and cards could be easily swapped out for different code or data files. Not a major disappointment, just seems like an opportunity was missed to make this product even better.

Second is with the indicator LEDs on the board. Four of them, scant millimeters apart, all blue…making them pretty much worthless as status indicators from across the room, where they all blur into a singular blob. Ten years ago, blue LEDs were novel. Five years ago, they were mainstream, festooning every last USB hub, mouse, flash drive and imported piece of crap. Today they’re just tired, let’s get over it. Different colors would indicate status at a distant glance.

Finally, not a problem with the mbed board itself, but it would be nice to see one of the Cookbook projects, the “BoB2” breakout board, made into an available product. The blank board can be ordered through BatchPCB, but after postage and handling the price for just the empty board — no components — is $33. Have this populated and mass-produced, bundle it with the mbed in a $100 package, and it sounds like a winning setup, ready to go head-to-head with the MAKE Controller.

But really, those are just nitpicks. Our real beef is with the software…the code editor specifically. If you find the Arduino editor aggravating, the mbed editor will have you seeing red (or maybe purple if you factor in all those blue LEDs). Like Arduino, there’s no true tab formatting; everything’s expanded to spaces, like it or not. Auto-indent cannot be disabled, and there’s seemingly no command to increase or decrease the indentation of a block of code. If you’re accustomed to anything more than arrow keys to move and click-and-drag to highlight text, the editor disregards a lot of system-native editing behaviors that may be deeply ingrained in your muscle memory (such as shift-clicking to select a range of text, or triple-click-and-drag for multiple contiguous lines). What’s more, the quirky behaviors are a little different across each browser and operating system. Don’t even try that triple-click-and-drag in Firefox for Mac…you won’t get your text cursor back without a complete reboot (seriously, just restarting the browser isn’t sufficient). And at present, only the most common browsers are supported; all others are currently shut out.

The closed-source nature of the tools may also be off-putting to some. If one finds the Arduino editor distasteful, there are options: get in there and change the code, or simply use a different editor and link with the Arduino libraries manually…it’s all legal and encouraged. With mbed, there are no alternatives. Access to the compiler and libraries is “free as in beer,” but not “free as in speech.” There’s little recourse should the service ever be taken down, or if they should suddenly start charging a subscription fee (there’s no indication this is planned, just a hypothetical scenario).

The good news, at least with regard to the former, is that software is of course infinitely more malleable than hardware, and it’s almost certain the tools will improve with time. The site is under active development…new “Home” and “Notebook” features were added for registered users just yesterday. Perhaps, given time, they’ll get the Command key working properly on the Mac. The selection of user-submitted code will expand regardless, making it progressively easier to do more and different things with this board.

In Summary

The mbed Tour page is frank about what the platform is good for, and what it’s not. mbed was intended as a quick prototyping and educational tool, and at that it excels. A lack of features such as a debugger or offline compiler keep this from being a professional-strength development platform, which is okay. Think of it as Arduino: The Next Generation. Although the mbed board costs more up front than Arduino, there are capabilities here that would otherwise require costly “shields” and strain every last byte and CPU cycle of the 8-bit ATmega328 processor: Ethernet, USB, SD cards…mbed handles these tasks with aplomb.

mbed is not without its flaws, and the “cloud” development approach may never sit right with some. For a product that’s just weeks out of beta testing, the results thus far are extremely encouraging. There’s immense potential here: a seriously powerful chip, easy to interface and to program. If the online tools can be improved, or if open source alternatives become available, mbed could be a major player. We expect to be seeing a lot more of this device in future hacks.

Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil.

Used for: Caps, Umbrellas, T-Shirts, Mugs and many others that has flat or relatively flat surfaces

The stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas.

Feature of printing:

1. Used widely – can print on plastic, clothes, metals and many other materials
2. Good printing thickness, up to 20 micron one time
3. Real printing effect
4. Good light resistance – can be used for outdoor product
5. Comprehensive ink option
6. Big printing area – up to 3* 4 meters
7. Can be reused/reclaimed after printing

Printing logo to increase brand awareness has always been one of the best method to promote your company or products.  Usually, screen printing is used when the logo has less than 4 colours.

ODM also make use of screen printing for some of our products like 4 in 1 cup holder,  Take A Seat, 4 in1 Coolzee and many more.

It’s far too easy to forget to involve the most important people in your software design: the people who will use it.

Your users are at the front-line; you should try to involve them in the design phase, so that their needs are acknowledged and their ideas considered and perhaps incorporated into your design.

Use software prototyping to give them interactive designs they can try out for themselves and see what works for them and what doesn’t. Listen to their suggestions and preferences. Value their opinions.

They will love to be involved, as they have a personal stake in the success of your design. Do it well, it will enrich their working lives; do it poorly and they may never forgive you.

In our research lab we´ve decided to work with a 3D printer in order to create quick and efficient prototypes. We want to investigate how to span the bridge from paper prototyping to a successfully 3D printed object. How should the design process look like when developing new tangible objects that have an added functionality such as objects on tabletop computers or ubiquitous computing applications ? This small video illustrates a bit of the pain we went through while assembling the RapMan 3D printer that literally comes in 10.000 parts. Feels a bit like assembling some IKEA objects but a thousand times complexer. However we are almost ready to print out our first tangible objects with it and hopefully produce numerous in the next month.

We´ve recently connected the Skype API with colourmix LED´s that were housed in a white paper cube. If you select the status “online” the cube would illuminate itself green while the status “away” would switch the color to red. “So what ?” was a first thought after the completion. When visitors came into our office and added their ideas  to of the physical artifact, e.g. rotating the cube and changing the status or having many of these cubes at a central location to communicate the workload of the co-workers and see if they are up for a brainstorming or other things the meaning of the quick electronic sketch became clearer: an essential tool in a culture of sketches while developing an idea further is to bridge the gap from paper sketches to 3 dimensional artifact sketches that would lead to other discussion than sketches on plain paper.

Rapid Prototyping(RP) is a good way to make a sample without mould.    If you are developing a new product, but thinks that opening a new mould is too expensive, you can try rapid prototyping.    The cost of using RP can be 10 times cheaper than making an actual mould cost.

What is Rapid Prototyping?

Rapid prototyping is the most common name given to a host of related technologies that are used to fabricate physical objects directly from Computer Assistant Design (CAD) data sources.    These methods are unique because they add and bond materials in layers to form objects.

Things to note:

• Functions cannot be the same as the real one
• Not very economical for mass production

Advantages of prototyping:

• Test appearance without mould
• Test structure without mould
• Reduce risk for making new mould
• Shorter sample lead time

Product Development Process is a very important aspect for inventors where sample making cost and time are to be kept as low as possible.     In addition, almost all types of products can make use of rapid prototyping to make samples  -   from pens, keychains, cellphones to cars and helicopters.

You can search for more inspiration on Inventions, New Innovations, Manufacturing Ideas to start off your brainstorming.   Our engineering team will be more than happy to help refine the designs before moving to rapid prototyping.

Last week, we discussed some reasons why we shouldn’t always throw away our prototypes. After all, we’ve invested a fair amount of time in them, so it makes sense to put them to as many good uses as we can.

As mentioned, a powerful use of a software prototype is as a training simulation. Well, we received a couple of emails asking for some more detail about using prototypes for training, and how best to do this, so here is a little more information:

To create a training simulation from a prototype, we ask certain things of our prototype:

• It must be stable (in terms of functionality)
  In other words, if we are going to use it to train users, it must reflect the system that will be implemented closely – otherwise the use of simulation will be counter-productive;
• It must be interactive and sufficiently detailed
  Effective training has to feel like a real system, which means it must be interactive. Navigation should work, logins should be simulated, drop-down lists should contain real-world entries, selections on pages should work as a real system would, there should be mock training data and so on;
• It must look and feel complete
  Each aspect of the prototype’s design should be consistent and complete, at least within the scope of the training requirement. There should be no ‘coming soon’ placeholder pages or anything that suggests a work in progress. Bear in mind that what we are trying to do is to make the simulation feel as much like a built system as possible.

Once we’ve confirmed that our prototype meets these requirements, then we need to think about what type of training simulation we want to create.

The two main types of training simulation that we’ll consider are:

Free (unguided) Training Simulations

…and…

Guided Training Simulations

‘Free’ training simulations allow the user to try systems out without imposing structure on what they should do, or how they should do it. Whilst there may be context sensitive help or general guidance on training objectives, the user is left to their own devices to explore the system and make their own discoveries. In these ‘unguided’ simulations, as we aren’t focusing on workflow or operational tasks. We simply want the user to gain confidence in, and awareness of, the system and how to navigate within it.

Guided training simulations are more complex from a design perspective as the overall aim is to guide users through one or more tasks – typically workflow or operational objectives – with supporting contextual material such as a step-by-step help system. Within a guided simulation, the objective is to train a user how to accomplish distinct tasks in a more directed fashion.

To create an unguided training simulation from an existing prototype isn’t a huge task, provided it meets the criteria mentioned earlier. In fact, it’s almost a ‘freebie’ if enough care has been taken within the prototyping process. Certainly, it’s an added-value output whose cost shouldn’t add significantly to the overall budget and whose benefits will certainly out-weigh those costs.

A guided training simulation is a more significant undertaking – care has to be taken to add ’state’ to the prototype – and this isn’t always easy. We need to do this, however, to hold the ‘current’ status of a user’s interaction with a guided task, and also to use this to control the context sensitive guidance materials. Building a guided training simulator requires a greater commitment from management as it will swallow time and resources to create. However, for critical systems, or where complexity is above average, the investment in creating a guided training simulation ahead of time pays off in diminished risk of ‘down-time’ (whilst users get ‘up to speed’) and increased acceptance from those users as they are already familiar with a new system before it is launched.

In a future topic, we’ll cover guided training in some more depth, but for now hopefully this overview will be useful.

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One of the unexpected but incredibly valuable discussions that came out of the “protoFarm” workshop we put on a few months bask was the debate about decisions about prototype fidelity. My take on it, as I stated in my earlier post about lightweight prototyping is….. it depends. You should be asking yourself that question while keeping several things in mind:

.Define your goals

Where are you at in the project cycle? Delivering wireframes, testing the UI, conveying transitions, etc? Whatever the goal is, the point is to think about what you need to convey to the client or to your dev team and focus on the best solution for the milestone in front of you.

.But…. what tool? There’s so many to choose from

I tend to use clickable prototypes built in Adobe InDesign for expediting wireframe review and providing developers with and interactive design spec. There’s a slew of other options including HTML, Flash, Axure,  iRise, Fireworks, OmniGraffle and wait for it……good ol’ pen & paper.

Do you need a platform that generates specifications from the prototype and provides built-in collaboration? If so, then  perhaps Axure is the tool for you.

If you don’t need those integrated features, then you can look at thinner solutions like InDesign, Fireworks or OmniGraffle.

If you’re kicking off a project then nothing works better than pen, paper and a healthy supply of your favorite caffeinated beverage.

Regardless of the tools I’ve listed and missed, the point is that you should set a goal for yourself to understand your project and client well enough that you have a good feel for, at a baseline:

A) Context
B) Your skill set
C) Budget
D) Client Type

.Clearly, there’s a ton of things to consider in this discussion. What goes through your mind after reading this?

In class this week (in full mime-artist fancy dress – I just love Halloween!), we played around with the various types of prototyping. Asked to prototype a new system for elevator door buttons, we were given post-it notes, and a few minutes to try and spell out our ideas. Armed with our video camera (of course!) we produced this little vid to show our idea…

While working on our prototype, we went through various stages of communication, being allowed to speak, but with our eyes shut, being able to see, but not speak, and attempting to communicate our ideas through drawing and doing. We often use this type of paper-prototyping in our group meetings, it allows us all to be involved equally, and to demonstrate our ideas (no matter how crazy) in a fast and effective manner. By acting out our prototype (with the aid of some gloved-mime hands!), we were able to see the advantages and disadvantages to our ideas, in a similar way to the prototyping we undertook in our group meeting a few weeks ago (see video below).

As the ‘arty one’ of the group, I think my strengths generally lie within the visual areas of our experimentation. I’m normally the first one to pick up and pen and start doodling, but it’s really when all of us get a chance to stick our oar in that we come up with the most interesting ideas.

Phoning a friend to ask what they were doing at that specific moment was also an interesting (and very easy) way of gathering alot of user information in a short space of time. Experimenting with these different methods of prototyping is going to be very important for our group. Since we are creating a product which is generally fairly self-contained within a traditional format, if we are to create a product which is truly innovative and interesting, we must use these methods to their full potential.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before or said it under your breath “Damn, I wish I could quickly prototype this! Just to be sure…” Maybe it’s just me but somehow I doubt it. This is for all those User Experience Professionals and Interaction Designers out there that do know what I’m talking about. My goal of this post is to provide an entry level steps to getting up and running with this feature, so if you’re a master at this then you might not get a whole lot from the example.

A Little Background

Earlier this year I found myself at a professional crossroads to turn my back on an old friend and great application, OmniGraffle, in favor of returning to Adobe InDesign for producing user workflows and wireframes. I’d use the app plenty in the past so transitioning back was painless and to top it off I stumbled upon a feature that seemingly, was brand new. INTERACTION. “WTF does InDesign have that for?” Yeah, that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter and surprise at finding it. Well it’s probably been there for years but I just now found it, which lead to one of the largest unexpected breakthroughs in my career as an UXD/IxD/IA (you choose the label, as long as I get to keep doing the work).

It turns out that InDesign has a simple and very straightforward way for converting any object into a button that can execute a myriad of navigation commands. Yeah yeah, I’m getting to the sexy part. The point is that within one click you, and I, can EXPORT TO SWF!!! Hell yeah. I flipped out when the realities played out in my head around FINALLY being able to generate rapid prototypes that could also support rapid iteration.

You get the point. Enough babble, let’s get to the example and the inherent benefits….

THE EXAMPLE – iPhone Application

1. Create a new InDesign project of any size. My example is for an iPhone app so it’s sized accordingly. On the workspace menu, select “Interactivity”.

3. Create at least 2 pages in the document so that you have at least one destination page to navigate to.

4. Create a simple object with some text in it. For this example I created a rounded rectangle with some text.

3. Select the button. On the right hand side menu panel you should see a menu labeled “Buttons”. Select that next. Within that menu you will find everything you need to make a simple clickable prototype.

You can name your button and specify normal, rollover, and on-click states for the object. We can get into that more later. The main point is that once you have selected “normal” in the state appearance selector you can select an event to specify.

4. Click on the Event list selector and choose “on release”. Then click on the (+) next to the “Actions” label and select your desired navigation transition. For the purpose of this brief example, I want the button to take me to another page in the layout so I select “Go To Page”.  An input box will be displayed where you can specify the destination page for the on-click event.

5. Repeat this step on page 2 and cross link the pages to each other.

6. Once you have your two buttons and on-click events defined you will want to click on the File Menu and select Export. Select “SWF” as your export format.

7. Selecting the SWF option will bring up this menu. I suggest leaving it at it’s default setting sfor now. You’ll have plenty of time to tweak it later.

8. Click “OK” and you’re done, simple as that. The SWF will launch in a browser window and you should be able to click back and forth between

THE BENEFITS

I immediately saw positive results from presenting an interactive prototype as a supplemental deliverable during a meeting for delivering wire frames. The meeting was shorter by more than 50% because our client could subjectively experience the app workflow rather than relying on my explanation and their ability to visualize the interaction. They could walk away with a clickable version of the wires and use the actual wireframe docs and notation to better understand the intricacies of interaction not noted in the prototype. Sometimes I think we put the onus on a client to step into our shoes to envision things in the same manner that we might, which is quite unfair and honestly why they hire us/you.

OK, BUT WHEN?

One thing that’s hard to articulate is when it’s appropriate to use a prototype and at what level of fidelity? Well, it depends. You have to have a good understanding of the project goals, where you’re at in your design phase and what works best to communicate your goals. This is a long conversation that is worth of a blog post on it’s own. I should probably do that next…

So, for those of you that feel you don’t have time or $$$ for prototyping I present the following:

Exhibit A.
Reduced meeting time for presenting your deliverables = more time and budget for design or simply moving to dev sooner

Exhibit B.
You now have an interactive design spec for developers to reference when building the app

Exhibit C.
Allows you to deliver a behavioral representation of otherwise static documents. Wires provide tangible value as reference docs but the prototype tells the true story and allows for a rapid feedback/iteration cycle

Exhibit D.
You can easily insert .ai / .psd . / .fw files for rapid skinning of the prototype, if necessary.

So tell me again, why aren’t you prototyping?

“Twitter is over,” my partner at work, David, constantly chides me.  Even though I point out that Twitter isn’t just about telling people what you had for breakfast.  He goes on, “Look what happened to Second Life, you thought that was going to change the world too. Now it’s dead.”  That’s not exactly what I said.  But I did say that Second Life had tremendous potential to facilitate collaboration, work processes and relationships within the enterprise.  And that we hadn’t seen the last of Second Life.

With the launch of Second Life Enterprise, I don’t yet get to say, “I told you so,” but the reliability of my powers of prediction is looking better.

Second Life Enterprise

Second Life Enterprise now enables companies to use the same interface and features of Second Life on their own servers, so the content and information they place there is secure.  This is a big step, because security issues were an important barrier for many companies to use the Second Life platform as a virtual workplace.

Conference Center Island

The package, with a starting price of $50,000, includes VOIP, sandbox regions for virtual building and modeling, media and document file sharing, two conference centers and auditorium — virtual of course — and provides enough computing power to support eight regions and as many as 800 avatars all to work happily at the same time.

Who’s using Second Life Enterprise?  According to Linden Labs, 14 organizations have already signed up for the beta version, including the U.S. Navy, IBM and Northrup Grumman.  It will be in beta through the fourth quarter of this year and should be broadly available by mid-2010.

So maybe Second Life hasn’t changed the world yet.  However, it is being used by companies and organizations for a variety of tasks from teaching and training  to product development, prototyping and testing.  And it  allows teams of individuals from different geographies to come together at a fraction of what it would cost in “the real world.”  That’s good in the best of times, and great in times like these. IBM estimated it saved $320,000 by holding a recent conference in Second Life.

Northrup Grumman has used Second Life to simulate a control panel on a bomb disposal device, allowing workers to learn how to use it safely.  The company now does development work for clients where “one hundred percent of the product and the client relationship is virtual.” And Second Life has enabled Northrup Grumman employees at opposite ends of the globe to work together efficiently.

Ted Vera, Information Systems Department Manager at Northrup Grumman confirms something that I’ve always suspected, that the game-like elements of a virtual world could actually be beneficial to real work:  “We’re conducting real business, but there’s an element of fun that enhances the collaboration.”

Conference Center A 4

Beyond the firewall issue, now resolved for a mere $55,000, the biggest obstacle to broad scale usage of virtual words like Second Life is ease of use.  I’ve enjoyed Second Life, but it was darned hard learning to use, at least the public version.  Presuming the “learning curve” gets a lot shorter, or already has in Second Life Enterprise, I think the prognosis for a long, healthy life looks good.

There’s a saying in German that has always intrigued me — “Tot gesagte leben länger.”  Roughly translated it means, “Those presumed dead live the longest.”

This week Cathy emphasised the importance of Labelling, Navigation, Wireframes and Prototyping. I have been reading Chapters 6 & 7 of `Information Architecture:Blueprints for the web` by Christina Wodtke and Austin Govella, in conjunction with `Don’t make me think` by Steve Krug which are helping to put what Cathy is trying to explain to the group in context. The importance of the research at this stage is taking prominence and it is now easier to see why it is so important, as Wodtke and Govella point out ` Like your scenarios, the sitepath diagram will reveal features and interactions you might not have thought of. Not only that, but when you’re done, you’ll have a nice picture of how the system should work`.

Cathy highlighted the differences between two sites, clearly showing how to avoid making a homepage too difficult to navigate. She also stressed how labelling (or plain signage) should be as clear and uncluttered as possible to avoid the user deciding to give up and look for their goods/information elsewhere. A positive example of clear signage was `Moo.com` and in fact, the most prominent fact which we spotted as part of our group’s competitor reviews was how simple most of the sites we evaluated were.

Cathy emphasised that most users visit the web for 3 reasons only: looking for something, accomplishing a task, wasting 5 minutes before the next meeting. These are all important factors to remember when designing the site, although it is very easy to become so immersed in the site that it is equally as easy to forget what our user is actually trying to do, thereby over complicating the matter.

We touched on `taxonomy` and `folksonomy` as terms which are widely used when considering labels and how facilitate our user’s journey as smoothly as possible. We also considered how to make labelling as effective as possible i.e if a button can be termed `search`, make sure that it is labelled as such and not something more ambiguous. We then looked at the Jared Spool site which considers his theory on the `$300 million dollar button` and how succint labelling generated a company just such a sum by simply removing redundant buttons and labelling correctly. It is a simple idea but perhaps easier to describe rather than put into practice. Again, as a group, I hope that we will be able to put these theories into practice. It was interesting to compare the Amazon and Interflora sites and how they directed their customers to pay – with Interflora causing great difficulty and delay by circuitous signing and unnecessarily complicated form filling. This has given us much food for thought when considering our site, although, thankfully we will not be involved with a site which sells products so will not have to set up a payment Wizard.

During the afternoon the practical exercise in Dreamweaver was challenging because it was new and the HTML language was not something I am familiar with. Cathy has assured us that we will have a CMS (Content Management System) in place when we actually build our site but it remains a daunting prospect, certainly for me. We then concentrated on our group work.

The group has collated all user research and we are now drawing up our personas, scenarios and user journeys ready to complete the site mapping necessary for next Friday. I have now been able to borrow a laptop from my daughters’ school which has made my working arrangements easier than last week when I kept having to borrow various laptops from friends. I hope that our home computer will be fixed shortly with all data retrieved so that I can continue more effectively.