Thanks for the detailed answer, it was very helpful. Great articles by the way, keep up the great work!

David

If the product is not so new as to be completely alien to the end user I would bring a few storyboards to potential users, talk through the use cases / scenarios and see what the users think. This of course only applies for things that can’t be cheaply prototyped (e.g. if you are making a web app it’s best to just prototype an interactive demo – even interactive html/css is better than a static storyboard.)

If you are doing hardware, and the hardware is way too big / complex to prototype cheaply and you have no budget (e.g. you are making a new piece of farming equipment to compete with John Deere, for instance), you’d have to draw on experience and gut feel to help you evaluate competing proposals for user experiences.

If it’s a small enough hardware product (e.g. a handheld consumer electronics product) we often made non-functional prototypes. This lets you (a) feel the prototype in your hand to see if it is right from a human factors / ergonomics standpoint, (b) mime your way through use cases so you can imagine using it in real life – this helps you figure out if your theoretical use cases make any sense in real life.

For reasonably sized products, you can make form models very quickly if you know someone who can bang out a foam or foamcore model for you. Alternatively, (and I prefer this,) you can get a designer or mechanical engineer to hack up some surfaces in something like Rhino or Solidworks, then shell the thing and send it to an RP vendor to make a rapid prototyped part (SLA is my method of choice). Something the size of a mouse, shelled, would cost you a couple hundred bucks, but the ability to have a dimensionally correct model to play with in your hands is truly priceless.

Hope this helps!

Elaine

Particularly with respect to hardware, how you can validate and compare different user experiences? Without the physical hardware present, it would seem difficult to compare different user experiences; although I guess this depends heavily on the type of hardware product.

Thanks,
David

For software wireframing I like Balsamiq http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups – it runs cross platform (it’s an Adobe Air app). It’s mentioned in this wonderful top 10 list on this web design site. http://webdesignledger.com/tools/10-excellent-tools-for-creating-web-design-wireframes.

For hardware I am embarrassed to say I am low tech – I draw with pen and paper and then scan or take a picture I’ve tried a few drawing apps on the iPad2 but found that the interactivity is still lacking, plus it takes me more time to upload the pix than to scan to a target destination using the auto feeder. So I gave up. Maybe someone else would have a suggestion?

Hope this helps!

Elaine

Thx