Week 5A

Reading: 
Building Clickthrough Prototypes To Support Participatory Design
www.smashingmagazine.com

The beginning of the reading talks about prototyping and the importance of mapping out your app because it will fall short with small links and technical problems. High Fidelity is not the answer because you become so in the moment of design instead of making sure the user experience is answered. Having click through prototypes is the best way because it gives a user the chance to make sure they can get to each page that they want to without being confused. Clear paths are links will make it become a success. Before the prototyping process you must sketch out all your ideas to capture the best solutions. From the sketches become paper wireframes and then the wireframes become photos that you can take to place on to your phone and manually give the boxes that are on paper a gesture as if it were a working app. Pop is an app to let you do this type of prototyping of link pages to one another to make it seem like your using an app. As with all app there are pros and cons.

In Class: 

Today in class we worked on refining our prototype wireframes. We mostly spent the whole class reworking this concept because we wanted to make sure all questions were answer and it would be easy to go from point A to point B. We worked out most of  our issues like the redundancy and seeing what buttons and function were necessary. We proved our point with the side navigation bar that it would be necessary to hold our secondary information because it sort of like the Facebook app where everything that isn't located on the main page of the app goes into the navigation bar or hamburger.

Images below are the refined version of our prototyping.

The next images are our prototyping on paper app. The app is called POP and it allows you to take photos of the images and set links and gestures on top of the content in the photo to be able to use it if it were a real app. I had a lot of fun using this because it was nice to see our product in actual use and see the issues we would have when trying to get from page to page. 

Some errors I found were making sure they linked to the correct page. Because we didn't get anyone in our class to try out the app yet we would try and squeeze it in next class. 

I had one person outside of the class use it and they made me rethink the sign in page. For example you need to be able to swipe right and left to go forward and backwards to get to each page. Also a major thing they noticed was your not actually swiping right to move right. You have to swipe left to move right and I didn't think about that when I was placing the functions in the app.