reg:exp

Book Notes: "Prototyping - A Practitioner's Guide" (Todd Zaki Warfel)

My dissertation focused on prototyping tools for interaction designers so I have been keeping an eye out for relevant design process books. Two such books have recently been published: Todd Zaki Warfel's "Prototyping - A Practitioner's Guide" makes the case for prototyping in UI design and contains tutorials on constructing prototypes in various software tools. Fed Brooks' "The Design of Design" is a collection of musings on the design process, drawing examples from computer systems (Brooks' work) and architecture (of his own house). These are some first impressions after (partially) reading Warfel's book on my daily BART commute. Notes on Brooks will follow later.

Warfel addresses his book at fellow interaction designers that want to know how, when, and why to prototype during the design and development of user interfaces. The first part of the book surveys the conceptual landscape; the second part describes six small prototyping projects, each conducted in a different tool: on paper, and in PowerPoint, Visio, Fireworks, Axure RP Pro, and HTML+Javascript. This structure would have made the book a good candidate text for the UI Prototyping Design Clinics I co-taught this Spring at Berkeley; I will suggest the book to students in future semesters.

There are many things to like beyond the nuts and bolts description of how to use various tools: Warfel systematically describes which tool fits which purpose; he shows survey data which tools designers use today; and he adds multiple case studies that give concrete examples how prototypes were constructed and what functions they served.

At times though, the tone was too conversational, obscuring rather than highlighting insights. More importantly, the conceptual argument about the value of prototypes seems to mostly derive from the author's intuition and experience. Often, his arguments ring true. However, much has already been said and written in the HCI, computer science and design communities about different kinds of prototypes and the roles they serve in the design process. A discussion that takes this prior work into account or at least points to it for further reading would have been much appreciated (I have a partial list). Finally, many of the surveyed tools focus on the same small area of the design space of prototyping tools: creating static screens for desktop or browser-based UIs and hyperlinking them in some fashion. Continuous interactions, gesture/multitouch input, and other non-desktop UIs are only mentioned in passing. But that bias might be an artifact of today's tools - Brad Myers' survey of interaction designers from VL/HCC08 points out that designer need better tools to prototype rich interactive behaviors. Some tools to do so are already available: Flash Catalyst was recently released; and research projects such as K-Sketch demonstrate that we researchers can contribute better tools to rapidly create more dynamic prototypes as well.