Chapter 10
User Experience Prototyping
What's in this Chapter?
- What is user experience prototyping?
- Getting started with tools for prototyping
- Exercises and examples for paper prototyping
- Exercises and examples for mockup prototyping
- Rapidly creating functional prototypes
- Getting feedback from users early and often
Now that you've started to design your iPad application, it's time to get down to actually creating something. It's time to start defining and designing a user experience. As discussed in the previous chapter, it requires a lot of creativity, especially the willingness to let go of preconceived notions about how things should work.
I recently spoke with a user experience expert, Suzanne Ginsberg, who wrote Designing the iPhone User Experience. I asked her about the importance of user experience prototyping when developing enterprise apps for the iPad. According to her:
Most IT professionals are accustomed to designing enterprise software with little or no user input. Limited resources are the primary reason cited for this approach; however, involving users in the design process can greatly reduce your app iterations and save valuable engineering time. One agile approach to consider is paper prototyping combined with user testing. Prospective users are presented with your iPad app prototype and asked to complete relevant scenarios. Iterating on paper is the cheapest and fastest way to go, but many higher fidelity options are available for the iPad, such as HTML, Keynotopia, ...
