How and When Prototyping Practices Affect Design Performance

Google Tech Talk
November 19, 2009

ABSTRACT

Presented by Steven Dow.

How does the structure of prototyping practice affect learning, motivation, and performance? In this talk, I will describe research on iteration and comparison, two key principles for discovering contextual design variables and their interrelationships. We found that, even under tight time constraints when the common intuition is to stop iterating and start refining, iterative prototyping helps designers learn. Our results also demonstrate that creating and receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallel — as opposed to serially — leads to more divergent concepts, more explicit comparison, less investment in a single concept, and better overall design performance. This talk highlights relevant research in cognitive and social psychology and shares the results of our preliminary design studies.

Steven Dow is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the HCI Group at Stanford University where he researches human-computer interaction, creative problem-solving, prototyping practices, and computing for education and entertainment. He is a co-recipient of a Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Grant 2009-10. He received an MS and PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology and a BS in Industrial Engineering from University of Iowa.

Category:

Science & Technology

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• google
• tech
• talk
• design

[Repsejras]

If anyone is interested in some examples of early prototypes together with some explanation of the methods you can find more on this site: akosta.dk/en/category/prototyp­­ing/ :) Happy prototyping developers!

[Omirion]

It's not by how MUCH one differs from the other it's WHICH ONE is better.

And the study in itself is pointless to be sure, but the point is to prove a concept so that the concept can be used as a constant and not as a variable in future studies.

[xr0]

And you need thousands of people to draw any conclusions?

I'm guessing you're NOT a PhD.

[code933k]

I agree with the people below.

The study conducted by them was not about "how good" iteration is or "how much" iteration is sane. Conversely, what they test is how bad can things go when conditions for development are limited... (name it materials, time or experimentation)

Surprice! Products aren't that good.

...And here we re-discover what Plato knew 2500 years ago but thought with an empty logic and added impact by means of a slide-show, buzzwords and a conference room projector.

[julesjacobs1]

You can design a better egg dropper if you are allowed to test it. Surprise!!

Then he compares how much "already experienced" and "no experience" groups learn from experimentation. How many people are we talking here? 28 people. So at best that's 7 per group. Not possible to draw any conclusion from this other than the obvious.

[julesjacobs1]

The ad study. The critique made the ads worse. Obviously the critique wasn't helpful and the sequential people got more focused on critique wit less thinking for themselves. You got ~30 clicks per participant and 445 vs 398, so it doesn't mean much anyway. You can absolutely NOT draw conclusions about parallel vs sequential from this.

I'm sorry that I'm so harsh, but you're a PhD!