prototyping

A Multi-Criteria Based Approach to Prototyping Urban Road Networks




prototyping

Rapid Prototyping Capabilities for Motors

In a three-step selection process, designers can purchase a motor that is built to order using the company’s online configurator.




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The Keys to Successful Concept Testing: Prototyping

This is part two of a three-part series on how to successfully conduct concept testing with users, focused on prototyping. Check out part one (planning) to learn more.
 

Prototype your concepts

Once a well-aligned research plan has been crafted, it’s time to create a prototype (or multiple) based on your concept. There are a plethora of ways you can create prototypes that communicate your concepts to users; I’ll cover strategies that will help spark meaningful reactions and conversation.

Provide context to ground your concept

We humans as a whole are poor predictors of our own future behaviors, so it’s really important that your concept testing simulates the future experience you’re trying to test. Ideally, you want to ground your concepts, so a participant can envision it in their own day-to-day. One of the best ways to do this is by building in context, whether into the prototype itself or in the way you actually test out the concepts.

You can ground a participant in what they would actually do by: 

  • Adding small contextual details into the prototype (e.g. the participant’s name or location). 
  • Providing the participant with a realistic scenario to frame the prototypes
  • Designing a certain scenario into the actual prototype (e.g. error messages appear in).  
  • Conducting the test in the actual or simulated environment where it will be used. 

Grounding a participant can make a difference in how someone interacts with your prototype. Let’s imagine you and your team are redesigning a part of an online food delivery platform for restaurants, specifically the parts that hosts and cashiers use. When you put your concept to the test, you can ground participants by “simulating” a lunch rush atmosphere (distractions, loud noises, etc).

Build real-ish prototypes

It might sound counterintuitive but you don’t need high-fidelity prototypes for concept testing. While high-fidelity prototypes may best simulate the future experience, that level of fidelity may not be feasible for a few reasons: 

  • You don’t have the time to create something at that level of detail or complexity before testing.
  • You don’t have the details fleshed out yet.
  • You want your users to help define these details with you. 

Low to mid-fidelity (or as I like to call “real-ish”) prototypes can still get you to the insights you need and even have some unexpected benefits. It’s easier for research participants to focus on overarching concepts when interacting with low-fidelity prototypes. Higher fidelity prototypes tend to invoke feedback hyper-focused on the details. With lower-fidelity, research participants are more likely to provide critical feedback on ideas, since they don’t seem as “final.” You can also leave out certain details in a low-fidelity concept, which allows you to brainstorm with participants.

Again, crafting context is a large part of building out an idea that starts to feel “real” enough for a user to invoke a response. Some examples of real-ish prototypes with just enough context include: 

  • Setting the stage with realistic scenarios for how and when research participants would reach out to an AI chat bot in a therapy app.
  • Creating initial wireframes for a ride-sharing app that research participants test out in a simulated car ride experience, to understand what info is most helpful at each moment on the ride.
  • Sending research participants “updates” on their food delivery order, to learn what participants might want to know about their order’s progress. 

Be selective about which concepts to show

You may have several concepts (or variations on a single concept) that you want to prototype out, and test through research. They may all feel exciting and important, but showing too many in one session can leave a research participant with decision fatigue. Even if you need to test multiple concepts to move forward, you don’t want to show every single one you’ve come up with.

Instead, you’ll want to be selective. One way to help you decide which concepts are best to test is by mapping them out on a matrix.

Let’s imagine again you and your team have generated multiple concepts for your food delivery app that aim to tempt users to order takeout more frequently. Perhaps some concepts focus on individualized recommendations, while other concepts show social trends. First, create a matrix that has extreme aspects of the concepts on each end and place them where you think they might belong. 

Then, ask yourself a few questions: 

  • Are there two concepts that are too similar to each other? 
  • Is this concept playing it too safe?

These kinds of concepts may not give you useful feedback because they’re not distinct enough or they’re too neutral over all. Instead, you’ll want to select concepts that are on the edges of your extremes. Those concepts will allow you to learn much more about your users and how they might interact with your concepts in the future.


These tips will help you craft prototypes that research participants can more easily and accurately react to. 

To end this series, I’ll discuss how to prepare for the actual testing in my next article.




prototyping

Podcast | 3D Blister Tool Prototyping for Cannabis Packaging

In this episode the topic is 3D printed blister tool prototyping and how it can be used to improve cannabis packaging.




prototyping

agilePHM – a new open source product for rapid prototyping of PHM analytics

agilePHM We are launching a new product called agilePHM In Industrial IoT, I have been working with PHM  (Prognostics and Health Management) for a while and it is a well known discipline Prognostics and Health management(PHM)  is an engineering discipline focused on predicting the time at which a system or a component will no longer perform its intended [...]





prototyping

National Instruments and SolidWorks Collaborate on a Virtual Prototyping Solution

Integrated Tools Make Mechatronics-Oriented Design and Seamless Deployment to Hardware Easy




prototyping

What to consider with 3D printing and plastics prototyping

Robert Musselle, customer engineering manager EMEA at Protolabs shares what you need to consider with 3D printing and plastics prototyping.




prototyping

Designing and prototyping a novel biosensor based on a volumetric bar-chart chip for urea detection

Lab Chip, 2024, 24,2298-2305
DOI: 10.1039/D3LC00730H, Paper
Mahdi Samadi Khezri, Mohammad Reza Housaindokht, Mojtaba Firouzi
A volumetric bar-chart chip (V-chip) is a microfluidic device based on distance-based quantitative measurement that visualizes analyte concentration without the need for apparatus or data processing.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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620: Cloudflare #HotDrama, Auth, and Prototyping Thoughts

Show DescriptionWe dive a bit deeper into the Cloudflare drama of the past couple of weeks, Instagram ads vs Cara art, what to do about Auth in your app, pre-negging any sponsorships, prototyping and feedback on projects, and ideas for future topics. Listen on Website →Links Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force […]




prototyping

Rapid Product Solutions, Inc. Enhances its Array of Rapid Prototyping and Production Services

Expanded Facility Means Customers Get Faster Service for SLS, SLA, FDM and CNC Projects




prototyping

Guide to prototyping Android animations with Intel Animation Interpolator

  Introduction Modern user interface design has evolved dramatically in the last few years, with animation-rich interactions becoming the norm. On mobile devices, where screen space is at a premium a...




prototyping

DAC 2019 Preview – Multi-MHz Prototyping for Billion Gate Designs, AI, ML, 5G, Safety, Security and More

Vegas, here we come. All of us fun EDA engineers at once. Be prepared, next week’s Design Automation Conference will be busy! The trends I had outlined after last DAC in 2018—system design, cloud, and machine learning—have...(read more)




prototyping

Enabling Cloud Connectivity to All MCUs and MPUs, Microchip Launches a Range of Embedded IoT Solutions for Rapid Prototyping

Enabling Cloud Connectivity to All MCUs and MPUs, Microchip Launches a Range of Embedded IoT Solutions for Rapid Prototyping




prototyping

SpeakerChat for 05/01/20: Rapid Prototyping for Your eLearning Projects

We're bringing you something new: SpeakerChat. This event is both a way to revisit some great eLearning Guild content from a recorded session while also […]

The post SpeakerChat for 05/01/20: Rapid Prototyping for Your eLearning Projects appeared first on e-Learning Feeds.




prototyping

Introduction to game design, prototyping, and development : from concept to playable game-with Unity® and C# / Jeremy Gibson

Gibson, Jeremy, author




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Rapid System Prototyping, IEEE International Workshop on [electronic journal].

IEEE Computer Society




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Proceedings Eleventh IEEE International Workshop on Rapid System Prototyping. RSP 2000. Shortening the Path from Specification to Prototype [electronic journal].

IEEE / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Incorporated




prototyping

Proceedings 14th IEEE International Workshop on Rapid Systems Prototyping [electronic journal].

IEEE / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Incorporated




prototyping

Proceedings 13th IEEE International Workshop on Rapid System Prototyping [electronic journal].

IEEE Computer Society




prototyping

Rapid prototyping of biomaterials: techniques in additive manufacturing / edited by Roger Narayan

Online Resource