http://commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english

This isn’t documenting a design, but it’s a form of communication that gets your attention and is playful and engaging. The stop motion is well done, but I’m not sure about ease of production; wouldn’t this take quite a while to produce?

(via Steve Baty)

I agree, prototyping is definitely the approach that I think works best for highly interactive interfaces. Which is why I was kinda surprised at the response from my audience on Friday; they didn’t seem to think much of prototyping.

This is probably partly due to the issue I discussed above, whereby anything that doesn’t look finished won’t pass muster with clients (or at least they think their clients won’t accept it).

However, there’s also the matter of available skills. Building a prototype that is worth the time to do so, takes technical skills. Our team is quite lucky in that regard, because we have quite high levels of technical skills for a UX team. Including our ‘Javascript Ninja’ Patrick Lee :)

Perhaps this will change, as you have suggested, as prototyping tools improve and mature, removing the need for such technical know-how.

Documenting interactivity is notoriously difficult if you’re just using words and static pictures to describe it. But interactive prototypes (even crude ones) can demonstrate ideas much more clearly and with less effort all round. There’s nothing like ‘seeing it in action’ to really ‘get’ the idea.

The dilemma between lo-fi “sketchy” interface designs that promote discussion and change, and hi-fi presentations that are more readily accepted by (some) higher level management and clients is a tricky one.

The way we’ve tried to address this in our GUI Design Studio prototyping tool is to allow the visual style to be changed dynamically so that you can see the same prototype in full hi-fi splendour or as a more lo-fi wireframe. That way, you more or less get the best of both worlds.

I think that prototyping will become more widespread as the availability of the tools becomes more well known and their capabilities mature.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Patrick Kennedy started his interactive discussion session presented at the “Enhancing Online User Experiences” conference in Melbourne, Australia. November 13th 2008 with: “Do we really need all this documentation?”……