interactive prototype development
In today's world, many product design/development activities center around addressing the technical issues/problems associated with these new products. But not every design problem has a technical solution. Typically, many problems are realized the instant someone, in all their unpredictable glory, finds a way to identify the one unknown design issue that completely invalidates the design. People are funny that way.
"There is nothing more useful than a prototype for reaching agreement on the user interface and the availability of specific functions. Not only do prototypes nail down requirements, they win the hearts and minds of the customer."Davis & Leffingwell, IBM
We saw this problem happening over and over again, so we decided to do something about it. Something that not only changed the end product, but also fundamentally changed the process by which we reach that end product.
The creation of Interactive Prototypes (a cornerstone of our process) give users, developers, visual designers and - most importantly - client stakeholders a chance to more completely understand and evaluate a design before its finalized, when the costs to change that design are substantially greater.
How We Develop Our Interactive Prototypes
Inovdesigns' prototypes are primarily medium-fidelity, interactive tools that communicate the organization and navigation of the application - often called the Information Architecture. They also serve to depict how individual pages should be structured for usability purposes.
A typical prototype contains very few graphical elements, most (if not all) back-end functionality is simulated, and data is static. For web sites and web applications (and even for software applications), we use a combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript to simulate the actual intended behavior of the system.
Interactive protoypes allow for a more effective way to understand technical specifications, encourage and facilitate iterative design practices, and emphasize structure, content and functionality before visual design. They also provide a very rich test bed for usability testing.
A more detailed description of the process and benefits of building interactive prototypes can be found in our Coffee Talk, entitled, "Introduction to Medium-Fidelity Prototypes"