Development of Hi-Fidelity Prototype

Overview

In Component III, you developed a wide space of ideas, and focused on developing a number of sketches, polishing a limited set. In real life, you would use these polished sketches, along with your storyboard to get feedback from potential users. In practice, you would go through several iterations of this, where you develop ideas, gather feedback, and continue to develop more ideas.

At some point, your customers are going to want to see a more tangible prototype. In tutorial, you learned a number of ways to prototype, using paper, video, and pictures. These are ways that you can develop prototypes to not only understand what the resulting system may look like, but also what it feels like to interact with. Using these prototypes, you can easily evaluate your interface with users, understanding what aspects of the interaction works well, and what doesn't. These "quick and dirty" prototyping methods allow you to get that idea without expending the major effort that is required to develop a prototype using code. Due to time constraints, we need to skip this step.

For this project component, you will actually develop a prototype of your system in a language of your choice. You should develop a vertical prototype that addresses one "must have" requirement you identified in Component II, and refined in Component III. Your prototype should follow the design ideas you identified and storyboarded in Component III, but only to the extent that it makes sense. If you discover that an alternate idea/design works better, feel free to implement this; however, you will need to be clear about this modification, and justify it.

In practice, you could now demo one specific feature of the system and conduct usability or feedback sessions with potential users. This is often time consuming and expensive, so you may need a method to evaluate the usability of your interface that gets you results without having to involve users. This will be your task for the final component.

Your Mission

  • Build a vertical prototype. Using C#/Java or another language of your choice, build a vertical prototype that following a selected idea and storyboard you made in Component III. This prototype should be functional: not only in that the interface appears correct, but that the core functionality actually works the way that it is intended. The goal, remember, is to allow someone to understand how it would feel to interact with the system. Note that your system does not have to run on the device you chose (e.g. does not have to run on a mobile phone or tablet - you can use or build an emulator or just restrict the size of your interface appropriately.)
  • Demo your system. You will demo your system to your instructor and your fellow classmates in your tutorial section. Think carefully about how to demo the interaction of your system. You have 10 minutes to do your demo, and will need to answer questions from the class and your instructor for 5 minutes.

Deliverable

  • The deliverable for this component is the in-class demonstration of your demo.
  • The demos will take place on March 2th.
  • Bring a printout of of this grading sheet to class.

Late Policy

For project deliverables we will deduct 10% for each day (including weekends) the deliverable is late.

Plagiarism Policy

Deliverables should consist primarily of your original work, building off of others' work--including 3rd party libraries, public source code examples, and design ideas--is acceptable and in most cases encouraged. However, failure to cite such sources will result in score deductions proportional to the severity of the oversight.