High Fidelity Prototyping

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High Fidelity Prototyping

• Lynne Hall

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Overview

• High Fidelity Prototyping
• Advantages
• Disadvantages
• Creating Hi-Fi Prototypes
• GUIDS
• IDEs

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High Fidelity Prototypes

• Represent core functionality of products user
  interface
• Can be so realistic that user cant tell them
  from product.
• Fully interactive
• possible to enter data
• use widgets
• Simulate functionality of final product
• Can be horizontal or vertical or both

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When to use Hi-Fi Prototyping

• For testing user interface issues
• For demonstrating product to potential customers
  (internal or external)
• To clarify the specification

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Creation of Hi-Fi Prototypes

• Trade off speed for accuracy
• More difficult and time consuming to create than
  low-fi prototypes
• Often vertical, due to need to test certain
  features
• Address issues related to navigation and flow
• Serve as a living specification

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Prototype Development

• Do not develop 3 prototypes during requirements
  gathering
• Requires good programming skills
• Expensive of resource
• Wiser to use vertical prototyping for specific
  subset of features
• Use Graphical User Interface Development System
  (aka prototyping tools)

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Advantages

• Permit test and exploration
• Aid with customer / user buy-in
• Produces useful user evaluation results
• Look and feel of final product
• Can be used as marketing / sales tool
• Can be easily converted to a real system

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Disadvantages

• User frustration as product appears to be
  finished when really it was only a prototype
• Expensive and time consuming to develop
• Inefficient for proof of concept designs
• Not effective for requirements gathering
• Very difficult to actually discard and start
  again
• Users can be reluctant to change design

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Graphical User Interface Development Systems 1

• Packages that assists in creating GUIs
• Wide variety of packages available
• Free to expensive
• Diversity of languages / platforms

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Graphical User Interface Development Systems 2

• Developed specifically to enable rapid creation
  of GUIs
• Different and usually more useful than Integrated
  Development Environments
• Provide set of tools
• buttons, menus, icons
• text areas, list boxes, etc.

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Free GUIDS

• Amulet
• http//www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/amulet/www/am
  ulet-home.html
• Groupkit
• http//www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/projects/grouplab/grou
  pkit/
• Tcl/Tk
• http//www.sunlabs.com80/research/tcl/

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GUIDS Advantages

• Specially created for Graphical User Interface
  development
• Wide (often very complete) widget set
• Often generates cross / multi platform code
  templates
• Possible to customise and extend widget sets
• Code tends to be efficient

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GUIDS Disadvantages

• Can be time consuming to learn
• May be difficult to integrate interface with
  back-end code
• May use scripts rather than a known language
• Potentially little developer or technical support

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Integrated DevelopmentEnvironments

• An alternative to Graphical User Interface
  Development Systems
• Development Studios (C, Visual Basic, etc.)
• Delphi (Pascal based)
• Semantic Café (Java)
• Access (End user database development)

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IDEs Advantages

• Integration of GUI development
• Easy to use editing
• Builds on language ability
• Can be very fast if you know what youre doing
• Reasonable widget toolkits
• Wizards often available

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IDEs Disadvantages

• Fatware memory and processor hungry
• Tend to generate lazy code
• Often code slow and cumbersome
• Lack complete set of widgets
• May result in compromises being made because of
  limitations
• Not good for innovation

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Summary

• Positive points
• High Fidelity Prototyping is a useful tool
• Powerful method of validating design
• Wide range of tools exist
• Negative points
• Expensive and time consuming to produce
• Requires considerable programming skills
• Can be difficult to throw away
• User expectations may be incorrectly raised