Week 12 - Revisit Definition of a Prototype

As I learn more about digital prototyping and apply more of the concepts to my own prototype, I gained more and better understanding of prototype. One of them is as you creating a prototype, you should not worry too much about how it looks, and try to polish every detail to make it look nice. The priority is the concept and the functionality of the prototype, it should demonstrate the major functionality of the final product, but not necessarily in a fancy way. It can be pretty simple, and the elements that would occur in the final product can be represented by simple symbol or object. As long as the user can test if the functionality demonstrated works or not, we should not be worrying too much about adding good looking pictures, fancy animation and well polished images.

Moreover, at the beginning of this course, I thought that prototype should be the tool to test and implement the established functionality of the product. But as I go further in this field, I found out that actually prototype not only help us testing the functionality we decided, it also help us deciding what functionality to add, to abandon or to modify.  And this done mainly through the analysis of user testing and feedback, then refine the prototype to fulfill users’ demand. A perfect example is how we do our prototype suite, the video prototype is like a blueprint which describe how the game mashup is going work, what functionality it will provide. But we do not necessarily have to stick to the initial plan and change nothing. The users testing session is like a brainstorming, testers gave me a great amount of good advice and pointed out what I needed to refine. So I modified some functionality and abandoned some redundant feature, but also added something to make the game more exciting.

Looking at my initial description of my understanding of prototyping, I think it was pretty general and I will definitely add the new understanding above to my dictionary.  Another thing I want to change is I said the test and refine process of a prototype should be done as many times as needed. Considering that prototyping is a good way to reduce the development period of a product, it should be important trying to make every test effective. For instance by using good feedback collection method, refine the questions that will be asked to the users. Therefore I want to change my words to “the test process should be well established to reduce developing cycle”.  Reason why I came up with this idea is that in my building up the prototype suite, we got limited times to test our prototype and get feedback, then refine the concept and prototype. So I had to work very hard on deciding what functionality to demonstrate and what questions to ask. In reality it’s the same, a company may need a product to be on the market in a certain period of time, so developers have to really make every testing process count to make sure the final product can be established on time.