Prototyping as communication
Continuation of article about thinking of the designer .
“The process is more important than the result. When the result dominates the process, you start from where you started. When the process leads us, we do not know where we will go, but if we find ourselves where we need it, we will immediately understand it. ”
Bruce Mau, The Incomplete Manifesto of Creative Growth
I will continue to oppose the TK and the prototype in order to reveal the non-obvious properties of the prototype and the effects of its use. Contrasting TK and prototype should be understood as opposing what you have in the production process, with what may appear in it.
Members of project teams share the results of their work, lining up in a kind of food chain. As a rule, for each personal result weighs on the overall process. While everyone does his job, its content, the motives of the employee and the criteria for the decisions he makes remain hidden to other participants. Often, the analyst / designer / coder / developer understands the understanding of the project only on the basis of what he received from the previous link in the chain, and only at the moment of problem statement and estimation. At the same time - he concentrates on his local area of work, without conducting any additional investigations and not evaluating lost opportunities, prospects, consequences and interrelations of the results of his work with the results of other participants.
There are at least 3 unpleasant things. The first is that everyone defines a project for himself in his own terms; the idea of the final product becomes a set of intersecting (sometimes very weak) sets, each of which is a representation of an individual employee. The diversity of ideas is a potential source of interpretation errors, misunderstandings, stressful situations and even interpersonal conflicts. The second - there are so-called. areas of responsibility, when everyone is responsible only for their part of the work, and, as Peter Morville said, the entire “taste” of your products often flows through the cracks between these areas of responsibility. There are reliable indicators of such situations: when colleagues articulate something like “if we knew this from the very beginning, we would have done it differently” and “I gave them an excellent design / documentation / etc., Why did they spoil everything ". The third is that customers and end users remain on the sidelines of communication and practically cannot interfere in the discussion process, influence decision making.
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Of course, patterns, standards, employee class and refactoring solve many issues, but not all. Much solves the level of project communication. Perhaps the highest level is achieved when the opportunity for all participants in the development process (including customers and end users) is realized to review and understand the design situation as a whole and the place of your piece in the general mosaic, understand the background and predict the development of events, express your vision, discuss the accepted solutions and current implementation. The main sign that it was possible to achieve such a level was the “awakening” of the collective mind and the growth of initiative.
Imagine how much effort each project team needs to do to figure out for himself these questions, how many documents (starting with the TOR) he needs to figure out how many procedures to perform. It is desirable that when immersed in this procedural chaos, he does not lose motivation and find the strength to figure it all out.
Mr Federman reveals the meaning of McLuhan’s “the Medium is the Message” with such phrases: “the nature of the medium of communication is a message” and “a new medium of communication carries a new type of information”. Imagine a prototype as a new communication tool on a project.
A simple practical example: take Axure as a prototyping tool. In general, the choice of prototyping tools should be preceded by two things: determining the characteristics / parameters of the prototype and the prototyping method; Axure is good in that it is suitable for many combinations, and it is easy for participants in the development process to learn how to use this tool (of course, customers and end users do not have to, they should come to the aid of the guys from your project team). Combining Axure with an http server (a good example ) becomes a media base for broadcasting prototype messages to a wide audience. Moreover, starting from the first prototype of the draft, which describes the business idea of the customer, all generated html-prototypes posted on the http-server are available for viewing in a single interpretation. Add to this a wiki-like discussion engine. Make it so that by editing the prototype source file in Axure, generating and posting your version of the prototype as an illustration of the statements, everyone could present their ideas not so much with words as with the prototype message.
Such a prototype message will become the object of importing and exporting the ideas of all members of the project team, which should erase the boundaries of responsibility and develop a jealous attitude to the total product in each. Make the prototype as similar as possible to the final product - and get feedback from end users. Impress a customer - show how many ideas your team can generate, how a prototype evolves over time, acquiring new details, how an idea takes shape.
A unique feature of such a solution is the ability to deliver a prototype message from the customer along the entire chain (or even immediately) to the end user (imagine users reading TK and expressing their attitude to the future product based on what they read), the same prototype message by incorporating user reactions and changing accordingly, can return to the customer and come from one addressee to another number of times, accumulating changes. Those. there is an opportunity to make both the customer and end users full participants in project communication and give them the opportunity to polemize on a par with everyone. The prototype can play the role of a so-called. border facility that helps representatives of different groups to find mutual understanding and conduct substantive conversation.
We can present our food chain from the members of the project team as a kind of communication channel through which prototype messages pass. You can rate this channel and “calibrate” it by doing the following for example. The marketer composes a brand expression of the product, with the help of the project team, a prototype is created that fully reflects the expression, then this prototype is provided to users, their feedback and reactions are collected. There will be 2 things on hand for comparison: a precisely formulated brand expression and how it was perceived by users. It is possible to match the clear signal sent with the received signal, which makes it possible to investigate the signal-to-noise ratio in the channel, where and why distortions or interferences occur. Of course, you shouldn’t forget that mistakes may be in the expectations or in the very message of the marketer - but one way or another, users will correct it. And by launching a clear message of the brand expression to the channel and sorting out what mutations occur with it, you can predict and get more control over the passage and changes of messages (usually much less clear) from customers.
Using prototypes from the earliest stages of the project allows project participants to prepare for the implementation of their work in advance, identify patterns, expand the concept of the project, dive into the problematic, and become interested in usage contexts. The most powerful effect of expanding the vision of solvable problems is switching from the fixed goals of the project to flexible ones, when, for example, much of the functionality unclaimed by users is removed, or the search for a solution to a particular problem is brought up to create a solution for a whole class of problems, and the product becomes to occupy a new or more extensive / narrow niche.
You can reach a new level of motivation by organizing prototyping-communication as the process of shooting a movie: casting the actors using the Persona method, writing scripts, scene-wireframes, storyboards-storyboards, prototypes-presentations-samples-shooting-editing.
But the most pleasant thing that can and must change is that by participating in clear and constructive communication, everyone is more focused on fulfilling his immediate professional duties, working on issues of creativity, rather than on issues of creative conditions. Ideally, each participant sees clear goals, concentrates better and plunges deep into his sphere, receives feedback, feels the participation of the whole team, turns on faster, learns more easily and believes more in his strength, and as a result - is often in a state of flux.
“The process is more important than the result. When the result dominates the process, you start from where you started. When the process leads us, we do not know where we will go, but if we find ourselves where we need it, we will immediately understand it. ”
Bruce Mau, The Incomplete Manifesto of Creative Growth
I will continue to oppose the TK and the prototype in order to reveal the non-obvious properties of the prototype and the effects of its use. Contrasting TK and prototype should be understood as opposing what you have in the production process, with what may appear in it.
Members of project teams share the results of their work, lining up in a kind of food chain. As a rule, for each personal result weighs on the overall process. While everyone does his job, its content, the motives of the employee and the criteria for the decisions he makes remain hidden to other participants. Often, the analyst / designer / coder / developer understands the understanding of the project only on the basis of what he received from the previous link in the chain, and only at the moment of problem statement and estimation. At the same time - he concentrates on his local area of work, without conducting any additional investigations and not evaluating lost opportunities, prospects, consequences and interrelations of the results of his work with the results of other participants.
There are at least 3 unpleasant things. The first is that everyone defines a project for himself in his own terms; the idea of the final product becomes a set of intersecting (sometimes very weak) sets, each of which is a representation of an individual employee. The diversity of ideas is a potential source of interpretation errors, misunderstandings, stressful situations and even interpersonal conflicts. The second - there are so-called. areas of responsibility, when everyone is responsible only for their part of the work, and, as Peter Morville said, the entire “taste” of your products often flows through the cracks between these areas of responsibility. There are reliable indicators of such situations: when colleagues articulate something like “if we knew this from the very beginning, we would have done it differently” and “I gave them an excellent design / documentation / etc., Why did they spoil everything ". The third is that customers and end users remain on the sidelines of communication and practically cannot interfere in the discussion process, influence decision making.
')
Of course, patterns, standards, employee class and refactoring solve many issues, but not all. Much solves the level of project communication. Perhaps the highest level is achieved when the opportunity for all participants in the development process (including customers and end users) is realized to review and understand the design situation as a whole and the place of your piece in the general mosaic, understand the background and predict the development of events, express your vision, discuss the accepted solutions and current implementation. The main sign that it was possible to achieve such a level was the “awakening” of the collective mind and the growth of initiative.
Imagine how much effort each project team needs to do to figure out for himself these questions, how many documents (starting with the TOR) he needs to figure out how many procedures to perform. It is desirable that when immersed in this procedural chaos, he does not lose motivation and find the strength to figure it all out.
Mr Federman reveals the meaning of McLuhan’s “the Medium is the Message” with such phrases: “the nature of the medium of communication is a message” and “a new medium of communication carries a new type of information”. Imagine a prototype as a new communication tool on a project.
A simple practical example: take Axure as a prototyping tool. In general, the choice of prototyping tools should be preceded by two things: determining the characteristics / parameters of the prototype and the prototyping method; Axure is good in that it is suitable for many combinations, and it is easy for participants in the development process to learn how to use this tool (of course, customers and end users do not have to, they should come to the aid of the guys from your project team). Combining Axure with an http server (a good example ) becomes a media base for broadcasting prototype messages to a wide audience. Moreover, starting from the first prototype of the draft, which describes the business idea of the customer, all generated html-prototypes posted on the http-server are available for viewing in a single interpretation. Add to this a wiki-like discussion engine. Make it so that by editing the prototype source file in Axure, generating and posting your version of the prototype as an illustration of the statements, everyone could present their ideas not so much with words as with the prototype message.
Such a prototype message will become the object of importing and exporting the ideas of all members of the project team, which should erase the boundaries of responsibility and develop a jealous attitude to the total product in each. Make the prototype as similar as possible to the final product - and get feedback from end users. Impress a customer - show how many ideas your team can generate, how a prototype evolves over time, acquiring new details, how an idea takes shape.
A unique feature of such a solution is the ability to deliver a prototype message from the customer along the entire chain (or even immediately) to the end user (imagine users reading TK and expressing their attitude to the future product based on what they read), the same prototype message by incorporating user reactions and changing accordingly, can return to the customer and come from one addressee to another number of times, accumulating changes. Those. there is an opportunity to make both the customer and end users full participants in project communication and give them the opportunity to polemize on a par with everyone. The prototype can play the role of a so-called. border facility that helps representatives of different groups to find mutual understanding and conduct substantive conversation.
We can present our food chain from the members of the project team as a kind of communication channel through which prototype messages pass. You can rate this channel and “calibrate” it by doing the following for example. The marketer composes a brand expression of the product, with the help of the project team, a prototype is created that fully reflects the expression, then this prototype is provided to users, their feedback and reactions are collected. There will be 2 things on hand for comparison: a precisely formulated brand expression and how it was perceived by users. It is possible to match the clear signal sent with the received signal, which makes it possible to investigate the signal-to-noise ratio in the channel, where and why distortions or interferences occur. Of course, you shouldn’t forget that mistakes may be in the expectations or in the very message of the marketer - but one way or another, users will correct it. And by launching a clear message of the brand expression to the channel and sorting out what mutations occur with it, you can predict and get more control over the passage and changes of messages (usually much less clear) from customers.
Using prototypes from the earliest stages of the project allows project participants to prepare for the implementation of their work in advance, identify patterns, expand the concept of the project, dive into the problematic, and become interested in usage contexts. The most powerful effect of expanding the vision of solvable problems is switching from the fixed goals of the project to flexible ones, when, for example, much of the functionality unclaimed by users is removed, or the search for a solution to a particular problem is brought up to create a solution for a whole class of problems, and the product becomes to occupy a new or more extensive / narrow niche.
You can reach a new level of motivation by organizing prototyping-communication as the process of shooting a movie: casting the actors using the Persona method, writing scripts, scene-wireframes, storyboards-storyboards, prototypes-presentations-samples-shooting-editing.
But the most pleasant thing that can and must change is that by participating in clear and constructive communication, everyone is more focused on fulfilling his immediate professional duties, working on issues of creativity, rather than on issues of creative conditions. Ideally, each participant sees clear goals, concentrates better and plunges deep into his sphere, receives feedback, feels the participation of the whole team, turns on faster, learns more easily and believes more in his strength, and as a result - is often in a state of flux.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/57063/
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