Coursera Assignment  Design Thinking for Innovation

Challenge:

In one of the recent projects I had worked with, the initial stages called for multiple low-fidelity prototypes. It was  for the development of an Android Application - Zeit. In doing so the challenge was to have a method to visually  display the elements in the application and the UI wireframe without wasting much time or moving to high-fidelity  prototypes. To visualize how the application works, first there needs to be a way to demonstrate the layout, the  placement of buttons and text boxes, the functionality of each must be clearly exposed and understandable. There  must be the whole process of completing a particular function visually explained so as to complete the task at  hand.

Apart from this, there must be multiple alternative designs made to the same feature. This helps focus on one  idea that may stand out and can be used explicitly. The challenge here was to come up with a method to have all  of these limitations accessed with minimum effort and minimum time. The prototypes made must be visually  enough to understand and must be easily disposed off.

Selection:

The tool selected was a visualization tool of Paper Prototypes from a reference to module 1 wherein  visualization is a key factor in the representation of design. The reason being, paper prototypes are better than  online wireframing tools, as they are easy to generate and the changes can be made rapidly. It helps show the  flow of a particular task and also focuses on what’s important and how to go about with it.

Paper prototypes can be easily used, as multiple alternate designs can be made and tested. It can also be easily  disposed off.

Application:

The application of paper prototypes as visualization tools was applied to a particular functionality of the  application. It involved the use of simple paper drawn ideas with the button and display placement for each  screen. It also helped visualize what would happen next after pressing on the particular button. Following is an  image showing the recently made prototype to show a particular feature.

In this prototype, using paper demonstration, the buttons and what needs to be displayed was sketched out. The  orange highlighted section meant what was clicked to move to the next page. The task here was to create a  collaborative task to monitor the progress of the team as form of a timeline.

Insight:

This tool was eventually very helpful. While testing it with users, there came about certain problems as to what  does this button do, it wasn’t clear enough, or perhaps, what if I want to go back, how do I revert the changes, and  so forth. This helped us note down the changes and come up with an alternate design within no time. Paper  prototypes helped visualize the key aspects as a rapid process, and complemented the next design phase, which  was wireframing.

After using the paper prototypes, it was evident that the flow of the app needs to be user-centric, which eventually  changed our thinking approach as we went about with the same. It encouraged to gather a more User defined UI  and functionality to the Application.

Approach:

One mistake in this process was that there was not much usability testing and thus very few paper prototypes  developed. This made our next process even slow, as we had no come up with a design, test, and make changes  with many iterations. This was truly time consuming and all the features of the app should have been scratched by  paper prototypes itself.

From the next time on any project, more time and detail would be given to the visualization tools for helping  understand the workflow, and to speed up the process in low-fidelity prototyping. There will be mini prototypes for  each feature, so as to cover as much research ground as possible.

