One of the main talking points during the reading seminar became the dilemma of choosing between a low fidelity and a high fidelity prototype in different stages of the development process. Our conclusion was that this depends greatly on the type of product we are making, for example a piece of software has a much lower barrier to making a high-fidelity prototype and one should thus be made much earlier in the development process.
An important part of the development process is realizing that that you don’t design in vacuum. The likelihood is that the final product will not be used alone and isolated but rather as a part of a greater system. As such a holistic approach to development is called for, we need to design in such a way that all of the paraphernalia is also in tune. For example the user manual ought to be written by us at the same time we are designing the product rather than outsourced and written later. This way we can keep the content of the user manual as close to the product and as coherent as possible.
Needs and wants. It is important to remember that many of the most useful and profitable inventions and design choices are not made to fulfil a need to but rather to tap into a want. This means that when looking for an idea we should not restrict ourselves to trying to find ways to
User-centered design, despite being extremely helpful, might cause problems if too much effort expanded on it at the expense of the other areas of design. To help us recognise the problems with overt use of UCD methods we ought to try to work out a plan before the we start the development process, this way we can better structure the whole development effort and we won’t lose time by being bogged down in abstract ideas but rather we use the UCD models to their fullest.
- The Group
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