The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design

By Deborah J. Mayhew

Chapter 12: Screen Design Standards Prototyping

Chapter 12: Screen Design Standards Prototyping

Purpose

There are several reasons to build Screen Design Standards Prototypes at this point in the Usability Engineering Lifecycle:


	?	The main point of Screen Design Standards Prototyping is to support the evaluation of the Screen Design Standards, generated in the previous task, in the Iterative Screen Design Standards Evaluation task that comes next . Feedback at this early stage of design means that designers will not invest a lot of time designing without knowing whether they are on the right track.


	?	Asking users to evaluate early high-level design ideas (in the prototype evaluation task that comes next) helps to continue the ongoing, highly iterative process of understanding and addressing user requirements. A continuous give-and-take between designers and users is a more effective approach than a monolithic approach in which Requirements Analysis is carried out exhaustively, followed by complete detailed design.


	?	The evaluation of the prototypes designed and built in this task provides feedback not only on the general Screen Design Standards generated in the previous task, but also on the specific detailed design to the small subset of product functionality embodied in a particular prototype.


	?	Because this task builds on all the earlier tasks in the lifecycle, it also serves to broaden the scope of evaluation of the Conceptual Model Design to new subsets of functionality and new users and user categories.

Description

The first step in this task is to select a subset...

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The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design