Our prototype design method

According to the Standish Group's "Chaos Chronicles", about 66% of software development projects are not failures, either exceeding budgets, exceeding project time, or delivering shrinking functionality.

The first three major reasons for the failure or loss of the project are:

lack of user participation needs or specifications incomplete requirements or specification changes

White brother in the last time, "Our ued design process and methods" also mentioned that some requirements management tools or hundreds of pages of documents are outdated, not as we talk to customers and the core of the communication. So we need to build prototypes to improve our communication with our customers, get our customers involved in the design, and help them find core requirements.

It is often said that the use of tools is the fundamental difference between man and animal. There are a number of tools that can help us complete the prototype design:

Paper and Pen

Paper and pen are the simplest and most common prototype design tool. With customers, and colleagues in the process of communication, do not interrupt the idea, pick up the paper and pen, can express our hearts. It's very, very powerful.

Visio

Visio is a common choice for product prototyping before axure into people's eyes. Visio is very adaptable, from a Web site interface, database model, to a floor plan to a process diagram, and Visio provides the appropriate component libraries and templates for rapid creation.

Fireworks/photoshop

Visual designer, a project manager, often prefers to make prototypes of products directly using graphic processing software.

Balsamiq mockups

A hand-painted style prototyping tool based on Adobe Air, which is rich in control libraries and can customize the appearance of controls. The export format is PDF and PNG.

Mockflow and other online prototyping tools

Similar to the Balsamiq mockups, each has its own characteristics, such as the Mockflow prototype template is one of its major features. The exported formats for these tools are also PDF and PNG.

As I mentioned earlier, the prototype needs to help me achieve two goals:

improve the efficiency of communication with customers, reduce the iterative cycle lead customers to participate in the design, find their core needs

Most of the prototype tools you've just introduced can achieve the first goal, but the output of these tools is usually a PNG picture, and it's a picture for customers, and it's hard for most customers to think about the logic in this picture. This time our protagonist Axure RP should be out.

Axure RP Pro is a prototype software produced by the American Axure Software solution Company. Axure pronunciation is "ack-sure", RP is "Rapid prototyping" (rapid prototyping design) abbreviation. As the name suggests, Axure RP can help you build the prototype of your product quickly and effectively.

Axure RP Easy to use, easy to operate, do not require any technical background, most people can grasp it in a day to make
With the method, so it can achieve the first goal mentioned above; In addition, the event mechanism of the Axure RP can simulate the interaction behavior that occurs in most Web applications, and its output is HTML, and customers can visualize the final form of the product visually through the "use" prototype, Consider whether the prototype reflects its real needs, so that customers can naturally participate in the design, thus achieving the second goal of the prototype.

Usually we divide the prototype design into two phases, "low-fidelity prototype" and "High-fidelity prototype". The role of "low-fidelity prototype" is to confirm product requirements and business logic with customers, so the low fidelity prototype is usually very simple, even we will deliberately do very simple, for example, we will use some hand-painted style of the control library, so as to avoid customers to ask some outdated questions; will be highly simulation of the final form of the product, is used to customer acceptance of the final product, on the other hand can also be used as a product development standards. When using Axure to make high-fidelity prototypes, it is almost as good as the last form of development, including visual and interactive behavior, which is hard to do with other prototyping tools.

uses axure RP to make high-fidelity prototypes

When we start a user experience design project, our first work is not a prototype design, before we need a lot of preparation: in the field to discuss with customers, understand the business logic of the product, conditional words will also be the product of direct users to conduct some interviews to understand the user's daily work. Then go back inside the company and brainstorm on the information architecture of the product, then the project manager will organize the brain map of the information architecture, and the brain map will be delivered to the customer for confirmation. After this series of preparations, we will begin to produce prototype products.

According to my personal habits, before the design I will use the paper strokes some sketches, and then make prototypes based on the sketch. The advantage of doing this is that I can express and validate my ideas as quickly as possible.

In addition, I will use some Axure control libraries to improve the efficiency of prototyping, for example: decoupled defaults and sketchy Axure Widget library for some of the longer term projects, we will organize some Axure RP's Visual Specification library, Improve maintenance and two design-time efficiencies, and use the shared Project feature to manage Axure RP's source files through SVN to facilitate collaborative design and source-code backup and versioning.