A Beginner’s Guide to Prototyping
First off all, let me start off by saying I did not design the prototype for my group’s app. Everything you are about to read is based off of personal observations. Anyway, let’s get into it. My group’s product was to be a fully fledged prototype for a social media news network, NewSMACK. Building a prototype for such a cumbersome concept can become overwhelming really quickly. Here are a few pro tips I think every beginning prototyper should know: 1. Head designers must employ other group members to do the grunt work. Let’s face it, half the battle to building mock ups is gathering the content for the app, and this can be a very time consuming process. Then on top of that, you have to photoshop and doctor up all the content you just spent hours searching for. So designers can lighten their load by directing others to do these tasks. Then all they have to do is add the completed photos into the design. The next one goes without saying, but 2. Plan plan and plan. We drew out some initial rough sketches for each page of our app, but none of these were sufficient blueprints. When it came time to build the app, it probably seemed even more overwhelming designing on a blank canvas. We really needed to be drawing in depth sketches with detailed notes about each feature/function. And every time we changed something we should have been going back to the drawing board with a new sketch. 3. Set strict deadlines for each page. This is a word to the wise. Setting one deadline for the entire app may seem like a good idea until it’s crunch time and a little bit from each page is missing. Then you’re scrambling back and forth between pages trying to fill in what you missed. If we had set a solid deadline for each page, we would have been able to stick to a schedule and track our progress. For example, one week make the “home” page due, then the next week the “profile” page and so on, that way you ensure each page gets all the attention it needs. Like I said though, I personally did not design this app nor had I ever had experience prototyping an app. These are just some of the things I would make sure to do if I were to do this again. My area of focus lied within NewSMACK’s social media presence. I have included a screenshot of NewSMACK’s Twitter page. It was interesting to cultivate an online presence for a brand and it is something that I will continue to interact with (so we can have more than 8 followers). When it was all said and done with, how do I feel the product turned out? I think the product correlated with the given time frame and design parameters. Had we had more time and freedom with the design software, I think the product would have turned out differently.