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I’d like to apologize for not keeping you updated on Project Borat. If you’d like some background, please read Project Borat, an introduction.

”In early stage design, pretend the interface is magic.”¹

We’re finishing up Iteration 1, which is a prototype and requirement feedback process. When I used to a house painter, we’d spend time painting small samples for the customer. The customer would come by when the paint was dry and compare the colors to what they had pictured in their mind and once there was an agreement, we’d move forward with purchasing the necessary quantity of paint for their house. Thinking back… I never questioned the ‘Show Samples’ process as it was just how the company did business… but now its obvious that people made many mistakes of buying colors that weren’t exactly what the customer wanted and would require a repaint. Development works a lot like this and this is where prototypes and mockups come into play. Painting a house is not quite like developing an application… but the process of getting customer feedback early before you invest in the rest of the paint is similar… and vital to the success of both. At least with too much paint… you can paint some dog houses. ;-)

Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a series of meetings with the Client to discuss prototypes, user interaction… such as:

• When User does X, what information should they be presented with?
• What types of people will be attracted to this application?
• What value are we building for these individuals?
• Might a user want to do z before x?
• What are some of your business rules that users need to interact with?

During this Iteration we also hit a major milestone for the client. For the first time since their idea manifested, they were able to see something visual and semi-non-functional that resembled what they had been thinking about for several months. It’s sometimes easy as a developer to forget just how important and exciting it is to see something that consolidates your ideas and within a web browser. To take it a step further… after Allison paired with their team, we deployed the prototype online so they could go back and generate more feedback in their spare time.

In The Art of Project Management, Scott Berkun raises the following questions for iterations and prototypes.

• What requirements does this satisfy? Can we verify this? (Usability, use-cases, etc.)
• What’s good and bad about this design relative to the problem it’s supposed to solve (Pros and cons for each of usability, business, technology, considerations.)
• What data do we need to evaluate this design? (Perhaps a usability study, an informal review by a programmer for engineering sanity, marketing, an expert’s opinion, etc.)
• What did we learn from this design that we should keep in the next attempt? Eliminate?
• Are there any other idea groupings or from from other prototypes that we should include?

Another important thing to do during any iteration is to keep a list of open-issues. Berkun suggests using a simple tool for this. We’re using plain text files in subversion and using Textile for markup.

What’s next?

• Idea consolidating
• More prototypes
• Discussing architecture plan
• Scheduling

Until next time…

¹ Alan Cooper & Robert Reimann, About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Wiley 2003.