How Prototyping Practices Affect Design Results

Dow, S., 2011, How prototyping practices affect design results, interactions, 18(3), pp. 54-9.

Due Date: 29 April 2014

COS70004 Usability

Tutorial: Tuesday 06:30pm

By: SNEHA MANDAVA

Total No. of Words: 1512

Introduction: The article is mainly about how to valuate different design processes particularly focussing on prototyping. The article clearly states that method or process does matter and practices do have an impact on the outcome. A Ceramics teacher story was given as an example to prove that prototyping practices affect outcome. The article implied that iterating multiple times under intense time constraints produce better results than allocating time to refining single product or prototype and this was proved by giving an example of egg drop test. Dunckers Candle experiment was given as an example to explain functional fixation of the developers. This experiment showed that people tend to think only about the primary function of the material when a set of materials is given to complete a task. However, the main concentration of the article was on parallel prototyping which was explained by an ad design experiment conducted. In this experiment, participants were divided into two groups, serial and parallel. The serial participants were given feedback by the expert critiques after every design and improvements were done accordingly. The parallel participants were critiqued after multiple designs. The only difference between both the participants was the timing of the critique and the ad designs were measured by click through rate, time on client side and expert ratings. It was noticed that the parallel ads were more successful in gaining the attention of users and experts as they were more divergent and generated wider variety of design concepts whereas many serial ads were more similar. This clearly shows that parallel outperform serial. This was because, comparison helped parallel participants learn throughout the process whereas serial participants were stuck with the same idea. And also, it was observed that the serial participants perceived the critique as negative and thus gained no confidence in the task whereas none of the parallel participants perceived the critique as negative. This was because of the emotional investment of the participants. When the investment is divided between the designs, there are less chances of perceiving the critique as negative and losing confidence. Finally, the article could be summarised as the following: Iteration helps participants discover unknown constraints and opportunity Iteration alone does not prevent fixation A parallel design process supports comparison and helps avoid fixation

Significance: The main purpose of the article was to perform a test to support the thought: Instead of just iterating solutions to a problem, what if people created and tested different designs in parallel. In this test, there were two types of participants: Serial and Parallel. All the participants were asked to create ad designs for the same client Ambidextrous which was a student-run magazine at Stanford. The Serial participants were given feedback after each prototype whereas the parallel participants created multiple designs before receiving any feedback. The study revealed that the parallel participants created more diverse ad designs. The article briefly explains that parallel designing controls fixation, avoids emotional investment in a single design, and obtains better and diverse designs (Dow, 2011). During the test, it was learned that the serial participants were not positive to the critique they received due to their emotional investment in a single design which was completely polished by them. The experiment revealed that when a single design is made and is improved continuously

according to the feedback, alternative options are neglected. Creating multiple designs (alternatives) and getting feedback in parallel results in more diverse solutions. It is good to consider this problem as often trying solutions; helps discover the right problems to solve. Argument and use of evidence: The article mentioned that Method or Process do matter which means that practices do have an impact on the outcome. A sticker which says Believe in process was on a wall in d-school which was shown as an evidence to prove the statement made ,as the sticker was a faith based notion of what matters to get the outcome of the design process (Dow, 2011). Dow (2011) claimed in the article that Prototyping practices effect outcome for which a Ceramics teacher story was given as evidence. In the story, at the end of the experiment performed by the teacher, it was learned that focussing on iteration rather than refinement actually gives better results and effects design outcome. And repetition helps users learn more and discover opportunities. This shows that Iteration is valuable given enough time. An Egg drop test was performed to prove that Iteration outperforms Non-Iteration. Even in this test, it was proved that iterating multiple times under intense time constraints produce better results than allocating time to refining single product or prototype (StanfordUniversity, 2010). Another claim made in the article was Iteration alone does not prevent fixation for which the Dunckers candle experiment was given as evidence. This experiment showed that people tend to think only about the primary function of the materials when a set of materials is given to perform a task (StanfordUniversity, 2010). It was also claimed that A parallel design process supports comparison and helps avoid fixation .To prove this, an experiment was performed by a group of participants where the participants were divided into two groups (Serial and Parallel). The serial participants were given feedback after each prototype whereas the parallel ones were given feedback after a multiple designs. The only difference between them was the timing of the critique and the designs were measured by Clickthrough rate, time on client side and expert ratings. It was noticed that the parallel designs received more attention than serial designs. It was stated that Parallel outperform Serial as comparison helped the parallel participants learn throughout the process, parallel participants generated more diverse design ideas and the serial participants perceived the critique as negative and thus gained no confidence in the task (StanfordUniversity, 2010). The evidences presented for all the claims made in the article were genuine experiments performed on people and thus trustworthy and effective on the reader. Implications: Iterative development of any software avoids a non-working system or a system full of errors to be implemented in a system. Any software during the development stage gives rise to many bugs or errors and if they are not detected during the early stages, it will become hard to tackle them at the end of the development. So Iterations help resolve them at the end of every iteration. It increases customer satisfaction due to rapid delivery of working software. Iterative development is always ready for the changing requirements of the user during the development phase. It gives a chance to

experiment and enhance the opportunities. Regular adaptation to the changing circumstances is possible. Prototyping allows early availability of a working system in software development. It helps the developer to make the user understand how the final software is going to look and work. This leads to a valuable feedback at the early stages which makes it easy for the developer to make the required changes and change the prototype. It is less expensive and takes lesser hard work to change a prototype rather than changing the final software. The article to me implies that the success of any task depends on the method or process. It also implies that prototyping has an effect on the outcome and parallel designing has better results than serial designing. It also implies that Iteration alone cannot avoid fixation and parallel designing is needed along with Iteration to avoid fixation. The article without any doubt has a positive impact on me as I agree with all the claims made by the author. Before I read this article, I believed that what matters for a success of a task were the people who were performing it. But the article changed my view that what matters is the method in which the task is performed and not the smartness of the people. The article helped me understand the importance of prototyping, especially the parallel prototyping where the feedback is received after a multiple prototypes which gives a chance to explore and experiment. Now, I know what difference it can make when rapid iteration and broad exploration is performed consistently. Being a web developer, I could use these ideas to test my work at every stage and make the necessary improvements instead of testing all my work at the end. This gives me a chance to experiment and helps me to produce diverse designs. Now, I can also start building multiple prototypes instead of a sticking to a single one and polishing it. Conclusions: According to me, the authors ideas are completely agreeable as the evidences presented by him genuinely prove his ideas. Prototyping and particularly parallel prototyping truly is an important tool especially in software development. Consistent iteration and broad exploration would definitely affect the outcome. It would always be better if the companies allocate enough time for iterations and prototyping as it makes the project less expensive than changing all of it at the end and this was expressed agreeably in the article.

References Dow, S 2011, How prototyping practices affect design results, Interactions: New Visions of HumanComputer Interactions, vol. 18, no.3, May, pp. 54-59, Association of Computer Machinery, viewed 24 April 2014.