Chapter 12: Design, Prototyping and Construction
Chapter Introduction | Web Resources | In-Depth Activity Comments | Teaching Materials
This site shows a set of bad designs for 'interactive' products, from filing cabinets to coffee machines, from car panels to traffic lights, and explains why they are bad. You might like to look at them yourself first and see what you think of them. The site is quite old now, but is no less interesting for that.
This well-designed website contains a range of methods, tools and basic explanations to support a wide range of interaction design activities. It specifically identifies the public sector as its main audience, but the resources here are just as relevant to other sectors. The page on prototyping www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/prototyping is particularly pertinent to this chapter.
Bill Buxton's home page contains a lot of links that are relevant to designing and sketching user experiences. I found the videos of his talks particularly interesting and useful, but there are many other resources linked from here as well.
instructables.com is a community website all about the wild and whacky world of making. It is not restricted to interactive products, but includes areas such as jewelry, 3D printing, solar energy, up-cycling and reuse, robotics, and cooking. The site gives access to tools, ideas, instructions and products. makezine.com is a similar website for sharing ideas, products and tools, while arduino.cc contains news and updates for the Arduino toolkit.
Story mapping is a technique for creating a user journey from a series of user stories. Jeff Patton’s book provides an in-depth description of the technique and this presentation of his includes some useful information about agile development as well as story mapping; the visual quality isn’t good, but the audio is clear. There are two different (and shorter) introductions to story mapping here and here
Links provided in the book:
- How soft interactive objects are printed (p424): www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jErWRddFYs
- 3D printing for fashion and interactive wearables (p424): interestingengineering.com/high-fashion-meets-3d-printing-9-3d-printed-dresses-for-the-future
- Wynd Halo and Wynd Home Purifier (p425): www.kickstarter.com/projects/882633450/wynd-halo-home-purifier-keep-your-homes-air-health?ref=discovery
- Benefits of High and low-fidelity prototyping (p431): www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-prototype-hi-lo-fidelity/?lm=aesthetic-usability-effect&pt=article
- How to create mood boards (p435): uxplanet.org/creating-better-moodboards-for-ux-projects-381d4d6daf70
- A tool to help create mood boards (p435): www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/boards-share-design-inspiration-assets/
- Third Age suit in action (p439): www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb0aqr0rzrs
- Overview of disability simulation experiment results (p439): blog.prototypr.io/why-i-wont-try-on-disability-to-build-empathy-in-the-design-process-and-you-should-think-twice-7086ed6202aa
- Microsoft’s inclusive design toolkit (p446): www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive
- Benefits of experience mapping (p453): youtu.be/eLT_Q8sRpyI
- Main elements of a customer journey map (p453): www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/
- Design Thinking articles (p457):
- Jon Kolko’s (2018) article: interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2018/the-divisiveness-of-design-thinking
- Natasha Jen’s (2017) presentation: vimeo.com/228126880
- Dan Nessler’s (2016) article: medium.com/digital-experience-design/how-to-apply-a-design-thinking-hcd-ux-or-any-creative-process-from-scratch-b8786efbf812
- Magic Cubes (p459): uclmagiccube.weebly.com/video.html
- Building voice-based services (p463): developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit
- Constructing augmented reality experiences (p463): developer.apple.com/arkit/