In this lecture, I will introduce some concepts and techniques that you can apply when developing and testing your prototype for an e-health service. I will first talk about the various purposes that a prototype can serve for a design project, then detail the anatomy of a prototype, and finally introduce some ways you can apply prototyping in your projects. When you have completed this lecture you will, to be more specific, have fulfilled the following learning objectives. You will know about the definition and purpose of prototyping in a design process. And how to apply prototyping as a method to create and test a solution. Furthermore, you will note how to develop and use mock-ups and wireframe prototypes. After the lecture, you will have skills to plan and apply prototyping at various stages in a design process, and design, build, and evaluate prototypes in collaboration with future users. Finally, you will have competences to reflect on choice of methods and materials in a prototyping process. The notion prototype issues to describe various types of objects in a design project. In essence, a prototype means an early model of a product, which is typically built to test the function, usability, or feasibility of a design in the making. Often, prototypes look like almost finished products. If we take a look at the DigiRehab product, this is definitely the case. DigiRehab looks like and fundamentally is a finished product that is built to test and document the effect of the system. To enable that, it is fully coded and lastly ready to implement. In practice, prototypes can look and feel quite different. Here are a few examples from my own work. All of these artifacts have been part of a prototyping process in at the signing and e-health application. First, a very simple paper mock-up representing the intended content of the application. And second, a fully functional software prototype where the interface looks and feels like a finalized product. The look and feel of these prototypes are different for two reasons. First, the approach to prototyping I present here is an iterative process. What this means is that a prototype is typically developed through several generations through which different aspects of the design is explored and the actual interface design is increasingly detailed. As a result, a prototype may significantly change its appearance during a project. Second, prototypes can serve different roles in the design project,. In this lecture, I will focus on two roles of a prototype. First, the ability to support during creating the design. Second, the ability to support you in testing of the design. When you plan your prototyping, it is therefore important that you think carefully about the intentions you have with your prototype. So navigating this will now look more into the roles and anatomy of prototypes. As I could by Zenos and others in the book Biodesign, The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies, prototypes can help answer many questions that are important in a digital design project. First and foremost, prototypes can help you get an idea of how the stakeholders of your project will respond to the product. For instance, by using your prototype to demonstrate or runs tests with users and stakeholders. In your case, this could include health professionals working with physiotherapy, citizens who are being treated, decision makers in the municipality, etc. Hereby, seniors and others argued that prototypes can help you learn about the novelty of your product, how to use this experience to design if that appears to fulfill the requirements. If decision makers experience it as a good investment. The prototype can also serve to evaluate the feasibility of a product and how much it requires to put it into production. This is quite typical for the way that prototypes are presented in literature. That they serve their primary purpose after design. While this is definitely an important purpose of prototypes, I will also you ask you to consider the role that prototypes can fill in your projects before and during the design process. As argued by Houde and Hill, common conceptualizations of prototypes tend to focus on the attributes of the prototype itself and on the technical fidelity of the prototype, or in other words, how closely it resembles a finished product. However, to develop a more nuanced view on how prototypes can contribute in the design process, Houde and Hill ask, what do prototypes prototype? Hereby, they suggest a prototypes can, in fact, also prototype other things than the specific attributes of the product. This includes the role that the product is going to fulfill and practice. This could be how a product is going to assist in rehabilitation or diet planning for people with diabetes and the implementation of the product. For instance, what is required of the technical platform it runs on the technical supports that, etc. To encompass these uses of prototypes, Houde and Hill therefore should test that we must add another dimension to the low-fidelity, high-fidelity continuum, namely the resolution of the prototype. This refers to the amount of detail of which the prototype represents the final product. A low resolution prototype could, for instance, be a draft of the interface of a software system that maps the overall layout and functionality of the product. Low resolution prototypes are simply used early in the design process to create ideas for the design and explore the overall concept. High resolution prototypes, on the other hand, map out the entire design and functionality of a product. High resolution prototypes are typically used late in a design process to test for instance the usefulness and usability of a product. Houde and Hills' two dimensional model of prototypes provide us with a relatively nuanced framework that allow us to talk about how different kinds of prototypes serve different purposes in the design process. By now, it should be clear that the notion prototype refers to artefacts with various attributes that can be intentionally shaped to served different purposes in a design project. In the remainder of this lecture, I would suggest two applications of prototypes that maybe useful in your innovation projects. The first is to use prototypes as a tool to create your design. The second is to use prototypes to test your design. Enlightened with the ideas of participatory design, a general recommendation is that you develop and test your prototypes in close collaboration with users and other stakeholders of the project. As I've previously argued, prototypes are often considered to be useful after design to test if you've got the design right. However, as argued by Tim Brown, another quality of prototypes is that they inspire new ideas. Brown therefore argued that instead of only using prototypes to test the outcome at the end of the project, you should build many prototypes during the project and intentional use this to create ideas for the design. These prototypes do not have to have high technical fidelity or high level of resolution. This maybe too time consuming and expensive to built. Furthermore, they may not be the type that in both creativity your process. If you wish to use prototypes to generate ideas for the design, I therefore recommend you to start building prototypes early in the process and to go for low technical fidelity and low resolution in the beginning. This approach is very much inspired by the idea of sketching. Sketches are simple drawings where you visualise the design concepts. As you can see you, don't have to be good at drawing to make a sketch. As argued by sketch virtuoso, Bill Buxton, there are some important things that differentiate sketches from ordinary, high-fidelity prototypes. Most importantly, sketches are suggestive, where prototypes rather give answers. Secondly, sketches are quick, easy, and cheap to make, and for the same reason also easy to give up and throw out, again, if they lead to a dead end. Buxton therefore argues the sketches are very useful for the part of a design process where you do not yet try to get the design right, but where you rather explore various possibilities to figure out what the right design should be. One simple piece of advice for you is therefore, when you discuss the design either in your design team or at a workshop with users and other stakeholders that you try to throw your ideas to visualize your thoughts and to think out loud, try to draw many sketches and try to let your participants draw. Perhaps you'll get a new perspective on the design and if not, you can simply throw away the sketch and move on with a new idea. This approach to sketching often supports a good dialogue on what they consider of importance with the product you're creating. Another method that is often used in the earliest stages of a prototyping process is mock-upping. A mock-up describes a scale of full size model of an artifact being designed that's typically made out of simple materials such as cardboard and styrofoam, and can therefore be classified as low-fidelity prototypes. On these pictures, you see a mock-up from my own work where I was in the process of designing an system for physicians at a hospital. The mock-up here consists of a background and numerous design elements including input fields, buttons, etc., that we used to construct and demonstrate different views. Mock-ups have several uses in the design process as argued by in the book chapter from 1991 called Cardboard Computers. One quality of mock-ups is the ability to define the rules of a language game. Mock-ups can, in other words, mediate the interaction between users and designers, when discussing the requirements for features of a new design with stakeholders of a project. One way to use a mock-up is therefore to demonstrate it to your users, discuss what they think about it, and possibly also to revise it based on the recommendations. Another common use of mock-up prototypes is to get feedback on the preliminary design. For instance, through a Wizard of Oz test. In a Wizard of Oz test, you should limit use of the new system by giving a user a task that he needs to complete using the mock-up. This could, for instance, be to find a schedule for the physiotherapy of a patient. The use are then simulates use of the mock-up by pushing the buttons as you would do on a normal computer application. While the designers changed the screens accordingly by shifting the pieces of paper. This type of test often gives you the opportunity to discuss the specific features of a design proposal with the users. Paper mock-up will, of course, not give the user the actual feeling of using an IT application. To get slightly closer to this the need for drawing and cutting cardboard computers, there are recently been introduced quite a few IT-based mock-up systems. Some are free to use and others require a subscription. The ones I mentioned here are in relatively wide use. One example of such a tool is Balsamiq. In this system you can build interfaces and add simple functionality. The result looks like a drawn mock-up but runs on a computer to make it easier to do testing. The purpose of such mock-ups is the same but the format is just a bit more up to date than the traditional cardboard mock-ups. Whereas, the prototypes I've introduced so far mainly serve to explore the design and to create design ideas together with users. You'll typically need to run actual tests later in the project. For this, you'll need a prototype with a high level of technical fidelity and higher resolution. To find the test of your design, you'll probably need to develop an actual running software version, but this is very time-consuming. So to get an earlier indication of how robust the design is, wireframes are commonly used. A wiresframe basically refers to a visual model of, for instance, an app that is mainly used to visualize, for instance, the layout. With modern tools it is, however, easy to build IC-based wireframes with extra functionality. This enables you to not only model the appearance of the design, but also to simulate the underlying logic of the final IT application. For instance, by adding functionality to. One out of many tools that I can advise you to use is the platform Axure that you can access on this link. Axure is a relatively advanced and expensive product, but it can be worthwhile to invest time and money in using it. With a little bit of training, you can develop high-fidelity prototypes that can be tested in computers, tablets and smartphones. You can use a high fidelity prototype to test your design in several ways. A typical way of testing a prototype is think aloud test. Here, you invite users for a session where you give them one or more assignments that they need to complete with the prototype, and afterwards tell about their experiences. This approach is quite similar to the previously mentioned Wizard of Oz test, and the main purpose is to identify usability problems that need to be corrected before the design is ready. In this lecture, we have covered numerous ways that prototyping can contribute to your digital design process. While prototypes are very useful for testing the outcome of your process, this is not their only purpose. Prototypes can also be very useful during the design process, for instance, by enabling you to collaborate with users and other stakeholders during co-design sessions. It is, however, not necessarily the same type of prototype that serves both purposes. And while the prototypes that you apply for testing your design will typically had the high resolution and high technical fidelity, it may be advisable to use more simple prototypes earlier in the process. When you plan your prototyping it is therefore important that you ask yourself, what should your prototype prototype? Thank you for listening.
