Deliver

“The Internet rewards people who learn in public”

• David Perell (on Twitter)

By showing our work early, by sharing a prototype or running a (public) beta, we learn in public. We're able to obtain feedback sooner, which means we're making a product that users love sooner.

Prototypes as a boundary object

Yang (2005) describes how prototypes are part of design language, because prototypes represent and embody design thought. In a similar groove, Sanders & Stappers (2014) describe the roles of prototypes in research through design.

• Prototypes allow testing of a hypothesis.
• Prototypes bring practise and theory together and force those involved to deal with confronting perspectives, theories and lenses.
• Prototypes evoke focused discussion in a team because the phenomenon is ‘on the table’. By demonstrating, we create a common understanding of the proposed solution.
• Prototypes act as a way to connect to our users, they allow us to explain a concept effectively, by creating an equal reality to learn about.

Different levels of prototyping:

When creating prototypes it's crucial to understand what we want to learn. Low fidelity prototypes are easier and cheaper and allow for quick iteration, whereas high Fidelity prototypes are much closer to the final product. The drawback is that they are more time-consuming and costly.

Low fidelity

• Low cost, rough and quick to build
• Easier to execute and less costly
• Early stages of a project
• Test many assumptions quickly
• Easy to get feedback on, since people *see* you're in early stages
• ex. paper prototypes, paper models, simple or rough sketches

Medium fidelity

• Slightly more detailed, still rough but closer to the solution
• Take longer to develop and costlier
• Prototyping phase towards refinement
• Make them resemble final products more closely
• Give people a better sense of what the solution might look like
• ex. wireframes

High fidelity

• Much closer to final, very detailed and much more time-consuming
• Provide an accurate representation of what the solution might look like with fine details
• They may include much of the expected functionality
• We may execute these using less-than-optimal mechanisms or technology
• Closest representation of the idea possible without the time and cost required of final production
• Ex. Mock-ups, coded prototypes

The five planes of experience design

Jesse James Garret (2011, pp. 19–22) describes the elements of experience design as the five planes; surface, skeleton, structure, scope and strategy. They provide a framework for talking about user experience problems. Building from the bottom, the issues we have to solve become less abstract and more concrete.

• Surface: Visual design
• Skeleton: Interface, navigation and information design
• Structure: information architecture & UX Design
• Scope: Content & feature requirements
• Strategy: Business Objectives and user needs

Chris Callaghan (2020) combined this to create a framework for effective prototyping. His framework describes how the fidelity of prototyping can be tuned on each of the five planes. The result is a matrix that describes how big the impact of these types of fidelity have on each of the functional layers.

Evaluate

When evaluating prototypes, it's important to ask both novices and experts. While experts show a wider range of issues, the problems are generally perceived as less severe. they generally know how to work around issues. Novices experience issues as more severe, but find fewer in total (Sauer, Seibel and Rüttinger, 2010).

Usability

Knowing which problems to focus on can be a big problem. There's been some research to categorise the severity of the issues users describe. Jakob Nielsen defines a set of metrics to define usability severity (1994) which focuses our attention to the worst offenders. To gain quantitative data to act on, Matt (Kendall, 2020) likes to use heatmap tools (like Hotjar). They record users' actions which help identify usability issues.

Click the button to toggle on a heatmap of your activity on this page:show

Note: This data is entirely local and never leaves your computer (I won't be able to see it)

Content strategy

Experience goes far beyond the actual product we're designing. Matt (Kendall, 2020) describes how content strategy should be considered part of the experience equally. Consider the importance of something like the box a product comes in. When buying a product, all else being equal, customers will opt for the business that sends products in a recycled box with a golden bow. Matt tells us how he's particularly intrigued by physical touchpoints of digital challengers like Warby Parker and Ace & Tate. Even their stores offer a better experience than 'legacy' counterparts by integrating their digital systems into the buying experience. They offer services like order-from-home emails after an eye measurement, which provides an overall better experience for the customer.

Beyond Experience

Content strategy focuses on content that creates an experience, rather than how to market that experience. However, there is a lot that we can learn from the marketing industry (UXBooth, 2016). Content strategy is aiding the digital sophistication of businesses, to improve the customer experience. Beyond that, it is also an opportunity for 'always on' data collection. In summary, content strategy is about:

• Automated content to offer a better experience
• Ongoing optimizations and upgrades, through always-on data collection
• Aiding digital sophistication of brands