Chapter 11: Design, Prototyping and Construction
Chapter Introduction
| Web Resources
| Assignment Comments
| Teaching Materials
www.baddesigns.com
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.
http://www.paperprototyping.com/
This is the companion website for Carolyn Snyder's book on paper prototyping. The site contains useful articles and summaries of tips for carrying out paper prototyping in detail.
The discussion is geared towards usability testing rather than design, but the techniques are applicable in design as well, especially given that interaction design is iterative, and so usability testing of paper prototypes will inform design development.
http://www.usabilitybok.org/design
The Usability Professionals Association is developing a body of knowledge for usability, and this website is the design section. You might like to look around at other sections of the UPA's site too. The knowledge here will expand over time so it's worth keeping an eye on it.
Apple User Experience Design Guidelines
A great resource if you are interested in user interface design and are a fan of Apple's style - but it's a substantial set of information so be prepared for a long session.
Windows Vista User Experience Design Guidelines
This is the Windows equivalent resource. It is interesting to compare this to the Apple guidelines, to see similarities and differences.
Prototyping tools
There are many tools to support the development of prototype interaction designs. This site has a good list to start with.
www.dgp.utoronto.ca/~hunt/telechi/hcitools.html
This is an old site and several of the links are out of date, however it also points to many links on usability, interface design, guidelines, web design etc which are maintained and which provide some useful insight into design. Just be careful to check that the information is up-to-date.
