Book review: “Prototyping – A Practitioner’s Guide”
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For the first time I could grab my hands on something really useful, a guide that helps you from scratch to a good level of knowledge and perspective. This book is for everyone, designers, developers, managers, and I even think clients should read it too. It is easy and fast to read. With its real case studies, you can feel how prototyping can really help you to reduce time, save money and do the right thing.
“Prototyping – A Practitioner’s Guide” book written by Todd Zaki Warfel is intelligently organized into three main sections.
- Section One theory and best practices of prototyping.
- Section Two method of prototyping.
- Section Three testing your prototyping.
Theory and best practices of prototyping
This is the most important section of this book in my opinion. If you don’t have any knowledge making prototypes or if this is your main responsibility at work, both will work for you.
Todd starts his book with the most important topic everyone should now, Chapter One – The Value of Prototyping. An amazing chapter that introduces how important prototyping is and what it can do for you, for your team, and for your client. And there is more, he tells you how to sell prototyping internally for your boss or client, perfect approach!
Next, two topics you can never forget, Prototyping Process and Guiding Principles. I can ensure you, as Todd does, if you apply these two topics into your prototyping life, things will be much easier, healthier, and less painful.
In Todd’s process you will notice that he emphasizes sketching all the time, and I have to agree with him. After I read the book, I’ll start my projects always with a simple sketch. Why? Because it saves a lot of time, effort while trying to explain features, reduce misinterpretation, and my favorite, it is free, everyone can use it, and it can be done everywhere you like.
After you managed the Prototyping Process it is time for some principles. These principles helps you to understand your audience, plan and create prototypes – that can be a paper prototype, a HTML prototype, or even a hi-fi Axure prototype. These principles are a good way for effective prototyping and avoid mistakes in the prototyping process.
Method of Prototyping
Now that Todd gives you the basis to understand what a prototype is and why you should do them, it is time to get your hands dirty and play with some sketches.
In this book, you will find six chapters describing different methods of prototyping. Each chapter shows strengths, weaknesses, how to prototype with each method, and additional resources like stencils for applications and useful links.
At the beginning of each chapter, there is a matrix which will help you evaluate the tool in question with several different methods and stages of prototyping. This is a really useful tool, it helps you to quickly choose what tool do you need for a given step of your work.
Todd covers the following tools:
- Paper prototyping
- PowerPoint and Keynote
- Visio
- Fireworks
- Axure RP Pro
- HTML
Testing your prototype
After you’ve learned what a prototype is, when to use it and to whom do it, how to sell to your boss and client, choose what tool suits you and your audience best, it is time to test them with real the people, the participants.
Todd describes a little about usability tests and how to take advantage of it after you are done with the prototyping phase. He also shows some common mistakes while performing usability tests with solutions to each one of them.
I’ve learned a lot from this last section of the book. Testing prototypes is not as easy as I thought it might be, you have to be carefully when choosing participants and creating a process to make the tests. Yes, usability test is not an event, it is a process.
Make use of tools like screen recording, audio and video recording. These are very useful tools for reviewing your notes and make sure to not miss any details while doing a usability test.