I had the opportunity to be the final speaker at the 2010 Indianapolis Startup Weekend event on Sunday afternoon. For the uninitiated, I’ve included a bit of background from the Startup Weekend website below.

Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, the weekend is a concept of a conference focusing on learning by creating. It is known for its quick decisions, ‘out of the box’ thinking (oh no, the buzzwords are attacking!), unique facilitation technique and letting the founders show what they can do. The program has already met with success in indianapolis, Toronto, New York, Hamburg, Houston, West Lafayette, indianapolis, DC and more.

The participants that attend a Startup Weekend decide what they want to tackle over the weekend and come out at the end with several developed companies or projects. Attendees are responsible for bringing the same desire and passion to the project and walk out of the room with the task at hand, in a short 54 hours. Sound intense? It is.

By all accounts the weekend was a success and the groups produced three strong concepts:

Zankit
http://www.zankit.com

GoBizSpeak
http://www.gobizspeak.com

NinjaButton
http://twitter.com/ninjabutton

You can view my presentation on “Designing A Startup” on SlideShare.

I’ll admit it – I’m a recovering design process deliverables junkie. Historically, the generation of process maps, usability audits, wireframes, site diagrams, application flows, mental models, task-level scenarios, user stories, standards documentation, conceptual frameworks, content audits, navigation maps, and countless other examples of design ephemera, were so central to the work that we created for clients that we began to view them as the work we were creating for our clients. In reality, as important as many of those deliverables may be, they are just means to an end. The end – is a finished product that customers want to purchase and use and a solution that meets or exceeds the clients expectations.

So before I start a holy war about the importance of research, process, and planning in User Experience Design (UX), let me be clear – all of the steps and deliverables mentioned above are, in many scenarios, important and useful elements of the design process. But as time has gone by, and we’ve continued to refine our own approach to design, we’ve begun to realize that by over-emphasizing their importance we’re doing a disservice to our clients and ourselves. Sometimes, some (and very rarely all) of, these deliverables are critical to delivering a winning design solution. But trotting them out in front of clients in an often vain attempt to either impress them, overwhelm them, or justify your fees often has the inverse effect.

In a brilliant post, titled “An Open Letter To The Design Community“, Marty Cagan at the Silicon Valley Product Group details some common traps that designers often fall prey to. In particular he extolls the virtues of getting to the real product, via Hi-Fidelity prototypes, as quickly as possible.

“Please people, if you want to succeed at your company, just remember this rule: the only thing that works to explain your design to execs and stakeholders are prototypes, the higher the fidelity the better.  Do yourself a favor and keep the sausage making within the design team.  Some execs will want to know how you got from here to there, and that’s okay, so long as you start with them understanding where “there” is.”

Do yourself a favor and keep the sausage making within the design team.

We’ve discovered a much more liberating way to engage our clients, do away with a ton of busy work, and deliver better design solutions in the bargin. In short, it’s about getting to the point. You can’t cut corners or entirely abandon the development of design support materials, but you can get much smarter about determining what design deliverables are essential to the projects success and which ones are only part of your process because you feel they have to be. I can promise you, at least in our experience, that most clients don’t care and aren’t nearly as impressed by many of the process-oriented deliverables that we, as designers, have come to hold sacred.

We’ve discovered a much more liberating way to engage our clients, do away with a ton of busy work, and deliver better design solutions in the bargin.

I’m not suggesting that you can go from a back of the napkin sketch to a fully functional product design without going through the painstaking process of researching user needs, mapping complex interactions, and creating comprehensive design specifications. What I am saying is that, that’s the stuff in the kitchen that you darn well better know how to execute on and that getting to something worthy of presentation in the dining room is where your focus should be. The faster you can get to a “real world” manifestation of the final product the happier your client will be and the sooner you’ll be able to begin the process of refining the design solution.

Our most recent app engagement began in the usual way, collaborating with the client on multiple rounds of wireframes and process maps, dialing in the inner workings and structure of the app itself. When we started to move forward into the initial visual prototypes the ideas for the navigation and overall aesthetic came fast, but we quickly realized something just didn’t ‘feel’ right. It didn’t take long before we realized why and just how easy it is to fall into the same trap that so many others do when designing for the iPhone. In an attempt to create something fresh and slick we were losing the very thing that makes the best iPhone apps ‘feel’ right – familiarity.

“… it is clear that a user interface feature is ‘intuitive’ insofar as it resembles or is identical to something the user has already learned. In short, “intuitive” in this context
is an almost exact synonym of ‘familiar.’”
—Jef Raskin

Spend time with the native iPhone apps such as Mail, Calendar and Clock, and you can see familiarity at play. While each one fulfills a different purpose, they seem like they were ‘cut from the same cloth’, related, familiar. They share common design elements such as standard header and footer bars with clear navigation controls. They share consistent colors, gradients, shadows and highlights. There is a minimal amount of information presented on-screen at any one time and there are no distracting superfluous visuals to get in the way. main navigation and other interactive elements are appropriately sized and spaced so they are easy to ‘tap.’

Some of the other native iPhone apps such as Weather, Stocks and Maps need to present more visual-based information, calling for more elaborate interfaces. However, Apple have managed to retain the same familiarity throughout by using the same basic principles. Many of the third party apps available in the App Store are also successful for these reasons. Below are some of the apps I use on a daily basis:

Any type of design project is fair game, including:

• Corporate identity
• User interfaces
• Concept prototypes
• Environments
• Service experiences
• Web sites
• Etc.

The following are a few questions to get your juices flowing:

• What was your most successful design project
• Tell us what criteria you used to evaluate it’s success
• Tell us about the problem that was solved
• Tell us a bit about the process you (or your firm) went through
• Include a link to a case study or blog post if you have one available

If you have something to share, just post your responses in the comments field below.

“Of the world’s total population of 6.5 billion, 5.8 billion people, or 90%, have little or no access to most of the products and services many of us take for granted; in fact, nearly half do not have regular access to food, clean water, or shelter.” – Design for the other 90%

These are startling statistics, despite the more socially aware we become each day. How then, can design become a dynamic force in saving and transforming lives, at home and around the world?

Recently I went to see my family in Ecuador. Even though I was excited and eager to get back to my country, I was already beginning to contemplate the design challenges that I would face when I returned, such as: poor transportation, a mediocre health care system, extreme poverty, disease, out-dated (and/or lack of access to) technology, and the list goes on.

Many third world countries still exist under conditions in which human-centered design approaches are not leveraged, underdeveloped or not supported by the government or private organizations. As a result of this oversight, many issues continue to rise, like diseases, homelessness, environmental degradation, and rampant corruption. As I watch these things happening, my mind races with ways that design could help remedy these woes. If only designers and CEOs in Ecuador were better prepared, trained and educated, then they would be equipped to identify and creatively solve complex challenges and help improve life for everyone.

“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”  
- Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises

One remarkable example of how design thinking and human centered approaches are helping to solve critical challenges is the case of the creation of the Q Drum which is a rollable water container design for developing countries to carry clean heavy loads of water through different terrains.

Innovation requires design thinking to explore and uncover new opportunities and ideas. By using Human Centered approaches like Ethnographic research, prototyping, and collaboration, we can capture more precise insights, encourage unrestricted thinking, create smarter outcomes and deliver user experiences that improve quality in organizations, businesses and everyday life.

These valuable methods and approaches are currently put into practice by many US companies, such as IDEO, Ziba Design, Adaptive Path, Doblin, Design for the other 90%, and Bruce Mau & the Institute without Boundaries. My hope is that the work of these companies will be used to inspire and change the way we think, consume, and help the other 90% of the population. For Instance, IDEO has created an open-source toolkit that uses Human Centered Design tips, methods and techniques to solve and inspire change for the creation of new world-wide solutions.

Ultimately, I hope to see first hand the effects of design thinking and Human centered approaches in my own Ecuador to help frame problems, uncover opportunities and solve complex design challenges.

At KA+A, we have a saying: “The best way to envision the future, is to see a picture of it.” In the UX Design world, this applies primarily to the innovation of products and services. Paragraphs, spreadsheets, napkins, and whiteboards are a good place to start, but they reach the limit of their effectiveness pretty quickly. Not only are the aforementioned mediums less than ideal for communicating with third parties (e.g. investors, upper level management…), they also make it difficult to identify the opportunities and problems that exist below the surface of an idea or concept (no matter how good of an idea or concept it is).

Enter hi-fidelity, immersive prototypes. When utilized early in the design and development cycle, they provide a rapid, and (depending on the specific approach) relatively affordable way to peer into the future of a product or service. They can be used to inform everything from interface enhancements, to full-on process and infrastructure overhauls. They can be applied to everything from software interfaces, to consumer electronics, to services delivered over the web or at a retail location.

In this post, I’ll be referring specifically to the use of hi-fidelity prototypes for websites and applications.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words. A Prototype is Worth 10,000.
If you’re familiar with IDEO, you probably already know the value of a prototype – although maybe not specifically applied to SaaS and other web products and services. The decade old ‘Inside IDEO‘ ABC special is definitely worth watching if you haven’t seen it. What you’ll see them doing in that video is building stuff (they have they’re own saying at IDEO: “We think to build, and build to think”). By doing so, they’re able to use the product they’re trying to innovate. And they’re able to observe others using it as well. They’re not guessing at the answer (or the future), they’re making it.

On The Web, the Details Always Matter
There’s a difference between IDEO’s product prototypes and the hi-fidelity screen-based prototypes I’m specifically referring to here: Details Matter. The web is a unique medium in that the details matter from the very start. If you’re designing a printed brochure, for example, you can print a quick mock-up with the images in low-res and dummy copy in place, and get a pretty good feel for how people will experience it. That’s because a very large part of that experience is created by the tactile nature of physical objects. A lot of the experience is made up of actually touching something.

The web doesn’t give you that luxury. What you see is what you get. Each element of a website or application plays an integral part in creating the experience users have with it: Are the colors and graphic elements in line with an organizations visual language? Do the buttons look like buttons? Are rows of tabular data readable? Are any icons used comprehensible and distinguished? Are links readily identifiable? Is a users location within a system apparent? Etc…

If any of these details are off, then we’re not representing the full and final experience. There’s no room for “well, in the real-world it would work like this,” or “it would really be this color.” Even down to the text and data, the experience should be realistic. No Lorem ipsem, and no tabular data that doesn’t add up. Make it real, so that you can gauge real responses. If you don’t, you’re just guessing.

Design From the Front Back
The hi-fidelity first approach is definitely from the ‘design from the front back’ school of thought. The idea is that you should first decide what an interface allows users to do, as well as how it looks and works, before you begin developing the back-end that drives it. This approach ensures that you’re users’ needs are front and center from the very beginning.

The Practical Uses of Hi-Fidelity Prototypes
Besides just looking great, there are numerous practical benefits to taking this approach to web-based product and service innovation:

• Provides an efficient way to test your assumptions and approaches with users
• Provides a tool for procuring buy-in from stakeholders
• Gives disparate departments something to rally around (marketing, sales, customer service, engineering…)
• Gives the development team a concrete framework to build on
• Provides opportunities to vet the big three questions – feasibility, viability, and desirability
• Illuminates flaws in process and thinking early on

So, What Does a Hi-Fidelity Prototype Look Like?
A hi-fidelity prototype is by definition fully designed, but the final product can take different forms. For example, if it’s early enough in an idea’s gestation, and your primary goal is to achieve buy-in from the powers that be, a single static screenshot might work. If you’re looking for more detailed feedback and want to test some of your assumptions, it’s probably best to build a prototype with some form of limited functionality (typically utilizing HTML, CSS, and maybe a small database).

There are times, however, when it’s a good idea to take things to the next level. For example, we spent part of this summer working on a next generation SaaS marketing application. In order to represent an array of potential use-cases, we built the final prototype in Flash and used motion and data simulation to create a rich and immersive experience that allowed users to explore the prototype in an organic and realistic way.

I’ve placed a few sample of some hi-fidelity prototypes we’ve developed at the end of this post. Note, some details have been removed from these images for the purpose of this post.

• Process flows are diagrams created to walk through the sequence of interactions a user will have with a particular web site, demo, or application. They visualize the paths, actions, and results that are generated when a user interacts with a system.
• Wireframes are a collection of loosely rendered and rapidly modifiable screen layouts, that guide the layout and placement of interface elements. Think of it as an architect’s blue print.
• A prototype is a fully designed visual representation of the finished product. It can be static (i.e. images), or functional, simulating a website or software application’s end purpose.

Visit our ExactTarget : User Experience Design case study to see what process flows, wireframes, and prototypes look like in action.

Define Daily Archive :

• (01): Brand / Brand Name
• (02): UX
• (03): Brandmark

While searching for something entirely unrelated I stumbled across this nifty little tool for rapid GUI prototyping on a whiteboard. You can check them out in greater detail here.