Week 9: High Fidelity & Low Fidelity Prototyping Tools

What is a PROTOTYPE?
When you hear the term prototype, you may imagine something like a scale model
of a building or a bridge, or maybe a piece of software that crashes every few minutes.
But a prototype can also be a paper-based outline of a screen or set of
screens, an electronic "picture," a video simulation of a task, a three-dimensional
paper and cardboard mock-up of a whole workstation, or a simple stack of hyper linked
screen shots, among other things.

Low-Fidelity Prototyping
A low-fidelity prototype is one that does not look very much like the final product. For example, it uses materials that are very different from the intended final version, such as paper and cardboard rather than electronic screens and metal.

Low-fidelity prototypes are
- simple - cheap - quick to produce.
-quick to modify so they support the exploration of alternative designs and ideas.
-never intended to be kept and integrated into the final product. They are for exploration only.

Tools:
*Storyboarding
*Sketching
*Index Cards
*Wizard of Oz

High-Fidelity Prototyping
-uses materials that you would expect to be in the final product
-produces a prototype that looks much more like the final thing.
-full-fledged development environments
-building prototypes using them can also be very straightforward.

Tools:
*Adobe Flash
*Visual Basic
*Smalltalk
*Microsoft Blend

Compromises:
The intention is to produce something quickly to test an aspect of the product.

2 common type of prototyping:
Horizontal prototyping - breadth
Vertical prototyping - depth

Conceptual Design
Concerned with transforming needs & requirements into a conceptual model

Conceptual Model:
An outline of what people can do with a product and what concepts are needed to understand how to interact with it.