BrightAct

First day was dedicated to initial ideas sorting.

Out of the 51 proposals, the teams are working on 24.

The second day  is dedicated to discussions, scoping out the ideas and starting to building the concepts.

I am helping out with product and technology related questions – getting the team to focus on what could achieved over this weekend and preparing them for the demo session tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will help out with building the prototype and demos. Some very interesting webs and mobile products/services…

Stay tuned…

Join me at the StartUp Weekend event this weekend.

I will be mentoring the teams on design, prototyping and other startup related topics.

Would be fun!

One of the most important parts of building a prototype is collecting feedback from the users.

It does not matter if you agree with it, it will always teach you something new. You could learn about a problem in the logic, a missing step or even how to better interview the next user…

Few key components for an efficient collection of user feedback:

And remember – you must understand that each user (even if s/he a power user or an opinion leader) still provide you one data point that may be effected by personal preferences, personal agenda or their mood…

Try to collect as much feedback as possible and keep track of who said what – so you could better understand the feedback.

Saw this interesting quick preview of the upcoming app, iMockups, exclusively for the iPad. Create wireframes and mockups quickly and easily for your web, iPhone and iPad projects!

This week I’ve celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day at one of my customer site.

Everything was Green.

The beer, the cakes, the grapes and the recycled paper plates…

Speaking of paper. Paper prototypes are great to test your ideas everywhere.

All you need to do, is to create the ‘states’ of the screens or flow you are testing and have users going though them.

You can also test the usability of your concept, just make sure you set expectations with test-user as for the level of details they should expect. And set expectation with yourself regarding the scope of the prototype and what questions you are hoping to answer.

Check this example of paper prototyping:

Paper Prototyping

If you are a PM interested in Prototyping, you must understand how engineers and designers define and address prototyping. In this interesting Blog post, Jonathan Arnowitz provides a great introduction to prototyping.

From the Blog post:

“…
A prototype is a model of a design that is:

• utilized for a specific planned purpose
• illustrating specific content and fidelity
• articulating defined requirements and assumption
• specified with prototyping characteristics
• customized for a specific audience(s)
• created with a specific tool
• performed in a specific method

Here is a less verbose but more specific version of the same definition:
A prototype is a model of a design with:

• purpose
• content
• content fidelity
• requirements and assumption
• prototyping characteristics
• defined audience (s)
• toolset
• method

…”

This post and Jonathan’s Blog are a great introduction to how designers thinks of Prototyping.

In the book – Effective Prototyping – you will find many examples as wells as ideas and tools he and his co-authors have.

As a PM, you may have another way of looking at Prototyping, due to your background, perception of the product and development processes, tools set, etc.

It is important to understand how other professionals in your team, in this case, designers and Ux architects, address the challange.

In the “Prototyping for PM” workshop, I provide real-life examples of these differences and methods to harvest the differences and building prototypes in an efficient, productive and fun way.

I’ve received a lot of great feedback for the “Prototyping for PM” presentation I shared at P-Camp.
Thank you for that.

As pointed out by Lynn and others, there are other great tool for prototyping.

For example:

• Balsamiq – Now with AIR application which allows you to work offline as well
• Protoshare – Collaborative, Web-based prototyping tool
• iRise – High-end and expensive “enterprise grade application definition platform”
• MS – Visio (Windows only) – or sketching and interaction design. Has a lot of ‘stencils’  and other useful templates
• Axure – (windows only) – for sketching and interaction design

The main point is that you need to choose the the best tool for the job, within your skill-set, budget, platform and availability constrains.

In the next posts I will include some techniques to develop simple prototypes with free/common tools/apps.

Thanks again for your comments.

Yesterday I had the pleasure attending P-Camp 2010.

Thanks to the attendees votes, I share the Introduction to “Prototyping for PM” presentation from the workshop.

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Links for few of the tools and services I’ve mentioned:

Tools

• Jing – Great Screen recorder for Mac/PC
• Skitch – Screen capture tool for Mac
• TechSmith – where you can find SnatIt, Camtasia, ScreenCast and other great products
• Omnigraffle – create low-high fidelity prototype (the Visio of Mac)
• Captivate –  Adobe tool for more complexed interactive prototypes
• PhotoShop and Illustrator – Adobe pro tools

Hosting

• Box.net – Easy sharing of large documents
• DropBox – Great tool to share, backup and sync your folders
• ScreenCast – Hosting for Camtasia and Jing recording

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If you are interested in this workshop, please contact me.
Please send me your comments.