Hello and welcome. For those of you joining us for the first time in course three, and for those of you who've been sticking around with us for this whole specialization. Today I'll be introducing this course which focuses on prototyping and design. So for those of you just joining us or for those of you who need a reminder, here's what happened last time in the specialization. In course one, hopefully you bought into user interface design as an important consideration for all technology to succeed. You also found examples of good and bad designs, and critiqued them to understand what makes a design work well, or not so well. In course two, you planned and conducted formative user research. You analyzed and abstracted the results, and you ideated. So I came up with lots of ideas and then selected the best ideas. So when do you actually get to make something? Course three is really where the rubber meets the road. This is the course where you actually get to prototype and actually make something real. Now before you run off to write code, code writing is not really what this class is about. So in this prototyping section, the two loose themes of the course are to manage your risk and to consider special cases. You don't want to spend a lot of time and a lot of resources and a lot of money writing code, if it's going to be writing code for something that's not really going to work out. So what you want to do, is you want to kind of manage your resources and to start with something that's maybe a little bit less resource-intensive. So in terms of managing your risk, in this course we'll cover why you may want to start with something that's more low fidelity, such as cheap and quick paper prototypes. Why then you may want to iterate and add some functionality to it with something like tool-based prototyping. And finally getting down to the really kind of nitty gritty of design by thinking about the details, such as layout and color and menus. And lastly, we'll also talk about this idea of being explicit and thoughtful about your design decisions, and being able to explain them to others. Again, this is all part of this idea of managing your risk, so that if you're working for a company, and your boss comes to you and they say why did you spend so many resources doing that. You can actually justify the process. And you can show them why you made the decisions you made, in a reasoned, hopefully user-centered way, showing them a lot of data along the way about why you're making the choices you're making. The other thing that's covered in this course and we think is really important is considering special cases. So, frequently designers focus on what they consider is the most common case. What they consider is the typical user. And the typical user frequently doesn't exist or sometimes it misses key groups, for example it might miss specific users. So age-specific considerations. What is the age of the typical user? I mean, you may know about the average, but there's probably also people at the tail ends of that who are also users of your system. You may think about accessibility specific considerations. When we think about design frequently, we just assume that the person doesn't have any sort of disabilities whatsoever. And that's not really true for a large portion of the population, or ability-specific considerations as well. What can this person do? And does your system support them in doing that. Additionally, a special you may consider if out of the context of use of your system. So maybe you've been thinking about your system as a web page, and you thought about the user using it on their desktop or their laptop. But maybe it's also worthwhile to consider something like how they would use it on their mobile device, because that may be a large use case of how they're actually making use of your system. The other use cases may be something that's wearable. So similar to my Fitbit here. This is also a computer, this is also an interface, but it's a very different design consideration than you would have if you were designing a web page. What about automotive, interfaces that are meant to be used in the car? Certainly the primacy of the visual sense, the idea that you need to give all your feedback in visual format. And that's really questioned in a car where you may really be wanting to focus more on audio or other things that won't distract the driver. And lastly, Internet of Things and physical computing, this idea that computing can be built in anything around us. In any of the devices. It can be inside furniture, it can be inside our clothes. And what does that mean in terms of gathering data from all of these devices, and then actually providing the user with a nice interface to interact with all of these devices. So thinking about all of these cases upfront, we'll help you to design better overall, and we'll help your solutions be applicable in more situations. So if I had to summarize what this course is about, this course will help you avoid making the most common mistakes as you make your interface. So I'm looking forward to having you join in this course. And I hope to see you in the next video. Thank you.
