Week 7 - Rapidly Prototyping Software Experiences

October 21, 2014

Overview

The native medium of software designs is code. Sometimes, to really evaluate the quality of a design, you have to experience it its navtive medium. In this class, we'll start talking about prototyping techniques.

Assignments Due Today

Craft a few sample datasets. Individually or with one other person, practice crafting a realistic dataset. The result should be a CSV file and a description of why that dataset is "realistic".
Learn a bit of HTML + CSS: If you aren't familiar with HTML, spend a bit of time getting up to speed on it. You should know these tags: div, span, h1, p, ul, ol, li. Likewise, you should know how to do basic styling in CSS. I have enjoyed using Code School but I have also heard good things about Codecademy. There's probably also a million other things out there. If you are having trouble, shoot me an e-mail and we can do a session together.

Class Activities

Prototyping and Testing Designs and Ideas: Ross Beyeler, Growth Spark (~40 minutes)

Ross Beyeler is the founder of local web design and strategy firm Growth Spark. Ross, who graduated from Babson in 2009, will be speaking about how Growth Spark tests ideas and designs from a usability and business value perspective.

View Ross's Slides

Activity Results (Hide All Results)

Ross's talk provided a very good introduction to the type of protyping that GrowthSpark does as well as a good introduction to a broad list of tools they use.

Instructor Analysis (Hide Instructor Analysis)

Bringing in opinions other than my own is good.

Introduction to jQuery, CSS, HTML (~50 minutes)

A cursory and (hopefully) practical introduction to HTML, CSS, jQuery and maybe a few other javascript libraries thrown in for good measure.

View HTML Samples Download HTML Template Download Class Example View Video of Class Example

Activity Results (Hide All Results)

In this talk, I walked through an example of building a fairly involved prototype in real time.

Instructor Analysis (Hide Instructor Analysis)

This example was too fast for much of the class. I, again, forgot that students didn't have much experience with javascript and css, and so the very detailed oriented introduction did not work as well as I hoped. It would have been better to do a simpler example so that the key concepts really got across.

Assignments Due Next Week

Layout a resume or home page in HTML and CSS. The goal of this exercise is to get you familiar with some of the intricacies of HTML and CSS. If you are already comfortable in HTML/CSS, feel free to go deeper.