Power Prototyping

Too many great app ideas get watered down or lost through traditional development processes, resulting in lackluster apps cluttering the market. With Power Prototyping, you’ll learn to discover, capture, and build on your most innovative and unique concepts as quickly as possible.

Power Prototyping is a full day, process-based workshop investigating techniques and strategies for mobile app prototyping through hands-on activities. The workshop will train practitioners to fail early, fail fast, and learn from mistakes to create better products.

Participants will form groups and collaborate to design a mobile interface. Drawing on a diverse tool set ranging from paper to software, participants will build prototypes and test their designs with users. After refining their initial ideas based on user feedback, participants will iterate through another version of their initial prototype, then present the work to the larger group for discussion.

A goal of the session is to consider how the tools and interactions available for prototyping activities might be improved or enriched for practical use.

Topics of Interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Novel interactions that have emerged from experimentation with prototypes
  • Innovative software products that can be used as prototyping tools
  • Paper prototyping
  • Best practices for user testing sessions based on prototypes
  • Choosing the right prototyping methods or
  • techniques for the task at hand
  • Acclimating stakeholders to the use of Lo-fi prototypes
  • Prototyping animations and transitions
  • Challenges inherent in prototyping for mobile apps
  • Guidelines for building successful prototypes

    • Some of the questions we aim to address include:

  • Why prototype?
  • What is the best way to rapid-prototype a mobile app?
  • What are common methods and techniques?
  • How does context affect how users perceive and interact with a prototype?
  • What types of interfaces and interactions can enrich the prototyping process itself?
  • What is the current focus of research within this space?
  • What will prototyping tools and activities look like in the next two to three years?