[MUSIC] Welcome to Introduction to User Experience Design. Today we will conclude our discussion on the third step in the user interface design cycle, prototyping. A prototype can be defined as a model of a novel design. In the previous lesson, I introduced you to a series of low fidelity prototyping techniques. In this lesson, we will finish up our conversation related to high fidelity prototypes. We're ready to build high fidelity prototypes when low fidelity prototyping no longer supports our design objectives. In other words, once we have run through a series of low fidelity prototypes and we have learned all we can, then we need to build a model that is closer to the final version of our design. There are many options for building high fidelity prototypes. What you use is largely related to the resources you have at hand. For example, if you don't have time to learn new software, you can use general software and repurpose it to model your design. If you have time to learn a new software, there are many user interface prototyping tools available. You can simply go to your favorite search engine and enter the term prototyping tools. You can usually get a free month's subscription. But be careful to keep backup of your work, because if the month expires, it may be gone. Finally, it may be that you're in a company that has many resources. If so, then you may be able to work with other professionals, such as software engineers, that are able to build the technical functionality of your design, or graphic designers, who make sure that the new design fits in with the brand's visual specification, such as layout and color scheme. Here are two prototyping exercises, try one or both. The first exercise requires that you iterate on one of the paper-based exercises from the previous lesson. Find the UI platform online and build out the five screens you designed in the card-based exercise, or build out the one that I suggested, if you like it better. Something else to try is to go to your favorite app store and find a study app. Consider the design features we discussed in the previous lesson and attempt to incorporate them into a preexisting app, using the UI platform of your choice. There are other prototyping techniques that I want to make you aware of. These allow us to model our new design, but don't quite fit into the low and high fidelity categories. They include Wizard of Oz, Proof of Concept videos, and Metaphor Development techniques. The Wizard of Oz technique is used to mimic functionality of a product by having a human perform the task usually performed by the computer. Here, the user is unaware that the product is not functional. This technique has the advantages of saving time and money that would be required to build a functioning product. However, it also has disadvantages. These include the fact that considerable time is required to get this to work appropriately and it always requires multiple people to operate. Think about the Wizard of Oz movie. Importantly, it's going to require a well trained wizard. Finally, users may have unrealistic expectations for the system, based on the phony functionality, which in turn may limit the feedback they provide, and so this may turn around and limit the inferences you can draw from the data you collected. So you have to be careful when using this technique. As designers, we may be interested in getting feedback about our design before we actually build it. We can do so by producing a video that shows the various features, functionalities of the system, in a variety of scenarios. Here's an award-winning example produced by Yong Jun Hyung, who was a PhD student at the time. Note that this is not the final version, so it's not perfect. The important thing for you to note as you watch the video is that you get a sense of how the system would work and in what situations it would be useful. So far, we've focused on prototyping the design and haven't really considered how the user thinks about the design. The Metaphor Technique is meant to help the user build a relevant mental model of how a new design functions. The metaphor communicates the functionality of the novel design compared to systems that the user already knows and is familiar with. Okay, so you just watched the Proof of Concept video for Social Mirror. Now try to come up with a metaphor for what the functionality of this system is, based on something that the user might know. What is Social Mirror like? Okay, here's my example. Social Mirror is like Mechanical Turk for individuals with special needs. Does this metaphor work? Where is it successful? And where does it fall short with regards to Social Mirror functionality? In evaluating this metaphor, the first question to ask is, does the user know what Mechanical Turk is? If the answer is no, then we failed. It's not okay for us to ask the user to go and learn what Mechanical Turk is. Now, let's imagine that the answer is yes. Then the metaphor works as far as the analogy to crowdsourcing systems. However, it falls short on a number of important measures. First, Social Mirror is a network of friends and family that do it for free, but Mechanical Turk workers are strangers that complete tasks for pay. Can you improve on my metaphor? This ends our lesson on the topic of prototyping. In the next lesson, we will tackle evaluation. I look forward to seeing you. [MUSIC]
