Category — Prototyping

Storyboarding How-To

Storyboards can be created from (usually smaller) sheets of paper, post-it notes, using a white or black board, using office software programs, or using a more specialized software program. A storyboard does not usually require a high level of artistic detail; instead it should only focus on details that are relevant for the interface design of the website. Thus, a storyboard can be built with simple shapes, such as basic line drawings. In some cases, simple wireframe prototypes can be used for storyboarding purposes. There are a few wireframe tools that even allow for wireframes that look hand-drawn. For optimal results, keep the following basics in mind while creating the drawings of your storyboard:

1.    Website navigation: Include the buttons and links that users will need to find their way through the website.

2.    Content sections: Don’t waste time on details, rather focus on how you plan to present the relevant content areas?

3.    User login boxes: Some websites have a login section. Include it if it’s relevant.

4.    Search boxes/engine: How do users of the site find relevant information?

5.    Page connections: How do individual pages of the website relate to one another?

Simple storyboards allow you and your clients or prospective users to focus on the important aspects and the usability of the user interface and not on details, such as graphics, color, fonts or other design characteristics. Thus, when creating a storyboard prototype, focus on the fundamentals first. Solid fundamentals usually trigger innovation in later stages of the web design process.

Key Benefits of Storyboarding

Storyboarding is useful for outlining, critically reviewing and optimizing the structure of a website and its interface design. It helps gain a good understanding of users’ requirements regarding a website’s interface design and structure and is a helpful communication tool to explore the tasks that need to be performed on a website or the context in which it will be used. Storyboarding is ideally pursued before the development process begins. When creating a storyboard, one should keep in mind these critical usability questions:

1.    Who are the visitors of the website? What is their background?

2.    What do they want to know? What do they need to know?

3.    How do visitors want to use the website? What tasks do they want to perform?

4.    How can I make navigating the website easy and simultaneously interesting for visitors?

Keeping these questions in mind when planning a website it is much easier to increase usage efficiency and marketability of a website, prevent costly development errors due to gaps in the requirements analysis, and ensure a great user experience. Creating websites that are well planned with user friendly interfaces will be more profitable for your project.

In this two part blog entry I shall explain storyboarding in the context of creating an interface design for a website. This blog post may be of interest for anyone interested in designing a website and is looking to gain more knowledge of how storyboarding aids the development process. Part 1 will focus on the basics and benefits of storyboarding while part 2 will go into some handy tools and resources.

Storyboarding Defined

Simply put, a storyboard is a series of sketches that allows one to visualize and organize content in films, narratives or interactive media, such as websites. Storyboards can be considered a kind of usability prototype that can help outline the structure and configuration of a website or clarifying a certain use case scenario. Storyboarding is the action of creating and using a storyboard to design a websites with a great usability or user experience by breaking down its individual aspects to identify critical functions, navigation paths, and other areas for potential improvement based on the perception of optimal usability from your user’s perspective. One might say that storyboarding can be used to create a blueprint of a website.

But even if screen designs have already been made in some hi-fi graphics software (e.g. Photoshop, pidoco° can add value to the process by bringing interactivity to static screens. Adding ‘click areas’ to the finished screenshots enhance the collaboration and interaction capabilities of a former static screenshot. Colleagues, clients and test users can now easily be integrated in the designs process and online discussions can be held. Just like web conferencing, but with real-time editing never seen before!

What are high fidelity wireframes?

In part two of this blog we shall have a closer look at high fidelity and other kinds of wireframes. Although sharing many of the same advantages with low-fidelity wireframes, a distinction between the two is that a high-fidelity wireframe is closer in design to the true representation of the final user interface. This is because high fidelity wireframes usually have slick and polished design features, even going as far as simulating an application’s work flow. Despite this high fidelity wireframes remain prototypes and usually require a lot of time investment to create which can be costly.

What are the benefits of high fidelity wireframes?

High fidelity wireframes usually are used in addition to and after low fidelity wireframes have been used to resolve the most impactful and fundamental usability or interface design problems of an application. Being eye-catching, high fidelity wireframes can be used to impress clients who have to sign off on a concept quickly. A high fidelity wireframe in this case would intuitively be faster for users to understand simply by glancing at them, leaving less room for misinterpretation. This is advantageous when designing complex user interfaces with lots of interactivity. In terms of your development team, high-fidelity wireframes allow you to collectively bring an interface to life. This helps in keeping a project’s budget manageable further satisfying clients.

What are medium fidelity wireframes?

It is worth noting that some people make the distinction of adding a third category; medium-fidelity wireframes which lie somewhere in between high and low fidelity wireframes. These are especially useful in larger projects when interface design fundamentals have been worked out, but more optically detailed representations are needed for pitches, presentations etc…

[Read more →]

The pidoco° screens design software consists of three main entities which complement each other perfectly. They speed up the interface design process and optimize the general workflow in all stages of interactive web design.

Clickable wireframes are quickly sketched with the Prototype Creator (just by drag&drop) and can later easily be shared and reviewed by colleagues, test users or clients. If there is need for even more in-depth feedback on individual aspects of the concept sketches, just use the digital prototypes to perform a plug&play remote usability test where moderator and test user are connected remotely by a shared screen and an integrated phone. All modules are aimed to increase productivity of the interface design process and ease communication within the team.

For the people who are into interface design, Rapid Paper Prototyping is old school! But ever considered doing screen design on screen?
With pidoco’s web-based prototyping software, interaction designers and screen developers can save valuable time, optimize communication within the team and build better websites for the web.

Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been in the know for a while to get a website started. The basic concepts of the layout will be put on paper and tossed around in the team. This prototype will then be put through a refinement process by implementing feedback from different stake holders. This paper wireframe will eventually act as a rough guide for the whole project – from start to finish. Some screen-designers even use these very limited paper prototypes for performing usability tests. Revealing usability issues in the prototyping phase can save a lot of money, since later changes in the so called ‘finished’ web project are minimized.

However, there are some drawbacks to Rapid Paper Prototyping.  Prototypes are not easy to add to the document servers and also difficult to collaborate on over different locations. Scanning paper prototypes and making them ‘clickable’ for testing use cases is also a time consuming task as we all know!

That is why many screen designers create their prototypes directly in MS PowerPoint or MS Visio and have them distributed to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the designs more effectively but it is not really more interactive than making duplicates of a piece of paper handing it to colleagues. The prototypes still do not show the real capabilities for test user excitement:  links, dynamic menus and combo-boxes etc. cannot be reproduced effectively and need to be explained individually in long specs. Again, more time and effort has to be invested to get the message across.

pidoco° has spotted this problem and made it their duty to tackle it by providing a really nice web-based interface design software.

Introduction to Rapid Prototyping
In research, development and study, prototypes play an important role. These developed prototypes help to do testing prior to production and help to pinpoint the possible problems that are occurring due to the design faults. Earlier generating a prototype model was extremely costly process and also time taking. But with the aid of Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) Machining, the speed at which a prototype is developed has increased. With Rapid Prototyping, this time period has even decreased from few days to a few hours.

Rapid Prototyping is an additive manufacturing process that generates a model of an object directly from a CAD model by building it in layers. For this computerized equipment are used that builds a three-dimensional model of a casting from a CAD drawing.

There are different forms of Rapid Prototyping available depending upon the needs. One can differentiate between them by the methods these systems employ to make the layers. Following are few of the main types of Rapid Prototyping:

Stereolithography (SLA)
Stereolithography uses UV ray to solidify liquid acrylic polymer layer by layer on a moving platform and after many layers, the prototype in the preferred form is formed. This process is carried on in a VAT, a device that is filling up with photocurable liquid acrylate polymer. Stereolithography is one of the most used forms of rapid prototyping because of accuracy (Tolerances= 0.0125mm), less time taken (depends upon the size and complication of the part) and where parts details are fine and their geometry is to difficult to machined.

[Read more →]

Through prefab website elements (e.g. radio buttons, links, navigation items, controls etc.) interface designers can create clickable and animated web or software interfaces within minutes. Without any programming skills, interface designers can focus on the web concept and use cases, site structures and the overall layout of the site, instead of getting lost in details that will later be overhauled anyway.

Now, where we have illuminated the hygiene factors, let’s move on to the higher level: the user experience. The difference between good usability and a real user experience, one can say is like the difference between just liking it and getting people to talk about it!

Serving users well and delivering everything that they expect is usability – a great user experience however is, when your site over-delivers exceeding expectations in some key areas. To create a great user experience, it is important to find out, what your users really want and expect. This can be done by user surveys and other (qualitative) studies. When you are clear about that, make sure, all hygiene factors are implemented and in place. Now it’s time to show your creativity and define areas in which you can and want to exceed expectations.

I suggest to either choose areas with low user expectations, since those are the low hanging fruits where it’s easy to over-deliver or issues that are the deal breakers where it is really important (and worth it) to put some more effort in to create something really impressive for your users.

But when creating real user experiences, do not make the mistake to just focus on your website! User experience has got to do with every point of communication over all the different media and channels (product, website, support etc.) between you and your users. It is like a web analytics system which only shows its real value, when the loop is closed and you can track users from the