Rapid Prototyping With a Piece of Wood
May I recommend Aza Raskins recent presentation on Rapid prototyping. He shares a lot of very insightful thoughts on how (and why) rapid prototyping is so important.
Rapid Prototyping with Aza Raskin from Dan Braghis on Vimeo.
Aza Raskin, creative lead at Firefox, shares some tips and tricks about rapid prototyping at the Mozilla Drumbeat festival
One of his points: “Aim to finish a usable artifact in a day. This helps you focus and scope.”
He shows this block of wood as example:
This block of wood has rather a history, because it is also a Palm Pilot. I regarded it started at Palm. Actually,
which he carried along with him for months. And he pretended to use it. Asking: What kind of things would i write on it now.And he tried this, and this is how he got a number of economical use-cases for it.
Again, this is a really complex piece of software – but all could be prototyped in one day.
So if you think about the things you are going to prototype, its going to seem big and complicated, but the most important and fundamental aspects of it can be prototyped in one day.
I am an avid fan of prototyping and have used it a lot in my work during the last 3-4 years.
Prototyping is highly addictive and also a necessity for getting feedback fast.
Related articles:
- Capgemini website article: Prototyping and Ruby on Rails (apr 2008)
- Prototyping Talk in Danish IT Usability Network (may 2006)
- Ruby on Rails as rapid prototyping tool (apr 2006)
- UX Magazine article: How To Prototype And Influence People with Aza Raskin (November 2nd)
