In Milestone 3, you're going to take your project from the concept that you developed in the previous milestone through the initial prototype and to the preparation for your first user test. I will offer some tips. Most of this is also in the form of a refresher, stuff that you've heard before. First of all, when creating your wireframes at your lo-fi prototype, don't sweat the small stuff. Don't worry about things like the fonts, Are they the right font, the specific images that you might be using to illustrate aspects of the site. Don't worry about making the layout really pretty or any of that kind of stuff. You're really focusing on getting the information that needs to be displayed on each screen or each state of the interface, getting that right, getting the navigation between different states, or pages, or screens, figured out and all of that kind of stuff. You're not worried about making it look really nice at this point. Another tip is you want to think about building the paper prototype for the user test. What I mean by that is, actually think about the tasks that you're going to test in your user test before building the paper prototype so that you can make sure that the paper prototype covers everything that you need for the test, but not really anything more. You don't need to detail every aspect of the system at this point. You just need to detail exactly what you need in order to support your user test. So, again, think about the tasks that you're going to test before diving into building your paper or your lo-fi prototype. In order to do that, you're to want to review the guidelines for user test design especially the guidelines for task design before diving into prototyping. So, you really want to think about the prototype and the user test design as happening in parallel not one after the other. Another thing you're going to want to think about at this point is how are you going to capture your user test. So, this is going to be a paper prototype tests. So, you're actually going to whether you create your prototype by sketching on paper or whether you create it using some digital tool. You're going to print it out and you're going to actually perform the test using the paper prototyping method. So, what's the best way to capture that? It's not something you can capture with screen capture software for example. Well, here's one idea that doesn't cost very much money. I can get the job done. This is actually a little tabletop tripod that has an extension that can hold a cell phones. So, I assume most of you have a cell phone that can capture video. If you don't, you probably know somebody that has one that you could borrow. You just snap your phone in there. You push record, you can point it down at the table, and you can capture what your users are doing. Remember, you also want to have them think aloud as they're doing it so you can find out what their thought processes are and things like that. I will mention that these devices, you can buy the tripod mount separately from the actual tripods. If you already have a tripod, you don't need both. But, this whole setup is going to cost less than about $30. So, it's a pretty cheap and pretty worthwhile investment if see yourself doing this kind of thing in the future.
