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In my opinion, the single most important idea that you could get out of this class
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is the idea that prototyping is a tremendously valuable strategy for effective design.
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In this video, I’ll introduce what I mean by prototyping and why I think it is so tremendously important.
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This is going to serve as a framing for later videos that we’ll use to introduce concrete techniques.
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In this class, when we talk about prototyping, what we mean is
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rapidly creating an approximation of a design idea so that you can quickly get feedback and learn.
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Prototyping is the pivotal activity in structured innovation, collaboration and creativity in design.
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Prototypes embody design hypotheses and enable designers to get feedback.
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It’s what Donald Schon calls “a reflective conversation with materials”.
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By trying things out and learning — from that exploration — you are able to improve your design
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and be able to gain insights that you otherwise may not have.
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It’s important to remember that the goal in prototyping is not the artefact; it’s feedback:
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Build some prototypes, try them out, and usually you’d learn to try to in the next design.
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One way to think about a prototype is that it’s a question rendered as an artefact.
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It’s something that you make as a way of communicating with other stakeholders:
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These can be clients. These can be other people on your design team.
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These can be users in an interactive system. They can even be yourself.
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And the role of the prototype in this communication is it serves as a common ground
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to help people understand really concretely what everybody is talking about.
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Here’s an example of what I mean by a prototype, courtesy of the design firm IDEO:
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In the mid-90’s, Kodak approached IDEO, asking them to help design an early consumer digital camera.
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Digital cameras were a very interesting technology,
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because they offered new opportunities for being able to review and edit your photos on the camera
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that wasn’t possible with the film camera.
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IDEO was tasked with a way to make sense of possible interactions that you could do on a digital camera
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and to render those on a concrete user interface.
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What they came up with ultimately became this: the Kodak DC-210 digital camera.
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Here’s the user interface on the back:
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There’s a screen and several buttons for being able to naigate through the photographs.
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It also has a dial here for several modes, and a zoom controller right here.
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Now let’s look at the prototype on the screen:
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You’ll probably notice some similarities but also some differences.
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The prototype on the screen and the final product both have buttons.
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They have a screen. They are of similar functionalities in this case.
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However, there’re also some important differences between this prototype and this final version.
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The first one is that the prototype is a lot bigger:
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In order to be able to build a version quickly, they couldn’t make everything miniturized.
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So it takes more a lot more physical space; the layout is similar but the scale has changed.
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Second, one of the most important things about a digital camera is that you be able to take it with you as it is mobile;
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This prototype camera here had an umbilical cord going back to a Macintosh
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that actually ran all of the computations and interactions,
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so there were no computation on the device itself.
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And finally, this was a prototype of a digital camera where you couldn’t take pictures.
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There’s no lens; there’s no photographic elements in this prototype;
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it’s purely a way to understand better the back of camera interactions for reviewing and editing photos.
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And I think this is a really important point about prototypes:
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It’s that prototypes nearly always are and ought to be incomplete.
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To pop back up from that example:
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Prototyping is a strategy for efficiently dealing with things that are hard to predict.
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And these hard-to-predict things are both
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things that you wonder whether there’ll be an issue but don’t know what the answers’s going to be — your “known unknowns —
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and the things that you don’t know, that you never got to think about — those are your “unknown unknowns”.
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And what’s valuable about prototyping is it helps you to get feedback quickly,
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so you don’t spend time heading down the wrong path.
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If you’ve ever taken an art class, you’ll know the experience of sketching before you make a painting.
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It’s not just for novices: Picasso did the same thing.
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One of the things that we know about human psychology is that
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people are notoriously bad at being able to estimate the space of possible outcomes.
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We often consider far fewer options than are actually likely to happen.
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And this is just as true in the financial world as it is in the creative world.
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For any complex system, whether it is finance or design, the interactions of all these ingredients
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far dominate the things that you can easily predict, and consequently our intuitions are often wrong.
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The strategy that we are going to teach you in this class is to encourage you to focus on
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the goals of the design rather than to think about a particular design itself
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and trying to railroad that strategy forward.
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A classic novice error is to come up with one idea for a design:
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You think you’ve got something that’s super cool and just keep arguing for that particular option.
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Instead of having that concrete thing you want to argue for,
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think about what you hope to achieve with that design idea — what’s your goal there.
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In this class we’re going to teach how to set goals early and evolve them and revise your design using data.
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As Bill Buxton points out in his excellent book « Sketching User Interfaces »,
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the kinds of alternatives that you’re going to consider at different points of the design process
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are going to be different.
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Early on, you may be thinking about a really broad range of possibilities.
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And then you might narrow in for a little while.
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Then you might consider some alternatives and narrow in.
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And this alternating flair and focus is a hallmark of an effective design process.
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Later on in the design, as you get toward the final product,
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you’re going to be thinking about small variations like fonts or colours or micro changes in layout.
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Early on you might be thinking about much broader ideas like:
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Is this going to be a mobile service or a desktop service?
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And what kind of thing is this going to be anyhow?
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Recognizing the need for and value of this oscillation can help you prepare for an effective design process.
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The Palm Pilot’s design process provides us with a wonderful example of prototyping.
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The Palm Pilot was one of the first digital PDA’s — personal digital assistants —
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and it helped you handle your to-do lists, and calendar, and contact information and notes.
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Its lead inventor was Jeff Hawkins; and Jeff, when he first envisioned the Palm Pilot,
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one of the first things that he did was create a block of wood that was the size of the device that he envisioned.
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And what he would do is carry this block of wood around with him and he would use it as if it were a real device:
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So he would tap on it and enter information, add contacts, record things in his calendar,
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take notes, furiously scribbling the whole time.
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So what did Jeff and his team learn from this prototype?
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Well, they obviously didn’t learn anything about the silicone or the battery life or anything of the Palm Pilot
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because the whole thing was made out of wood!
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What they learned was about the form factor, and what we can see here
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is that this was a great example of the rights and roles that a prototype can play in the design process.
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A prototype should not be required to be complete; it’s going to be incomplete in strategic and important ways.
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It should be easy to change — Don’t like the size of your Palm Pilot? Just cut it off a different size!
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And finally, it should get to retire:
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That, when you move on to a later phase in the design process, you no longer need the early prototypes.
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Given that we are in a class about designing computer systems and we’re talking about a block of wood,
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you might reasonably ask, “What’s going on here?” or maybe, “What is it that prototypes prototype?”
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And the answer is that there are several things that a prototype can prototype.
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One kind of prototype prototypes the feel — “What does this look like?”
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Another kind prototypes the implementation — “What might this work like?”
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And yet another kind of prototype prototypes the role —
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“What might the experience of using this interactive system be like?”
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This course will teach you a number of strategies that cover a bit of each of these categories.
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You can plot a prototype in two dimensions.
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You can think about how much you’ll learn from that prototype,
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and you can think about how long it took you to create it.
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And what you want to able to do, especially early on in the design process,
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is to be able to maximize the amount of learning that you are being able to get from that prototype,
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and minimize the amount of time that it is going to take you to create it,
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because — remember — a prototype is going to be incomplete,
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and it’s going to be something that you are going to get rid of most likely at some point in the process,
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and so there’s no point in sinking a lot of time into something that you’re soon going to throw away.
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Prototyping is not just for small things. In your prototyping you can think big — really big.
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Here’s an example from Walter Dorwin Teague, this guy right here.
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He is one of America’s foremost industrial designers.
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And he is standing inside of one of the very first Boeing cross-country airplanes.
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And what he’s doing is taking a look at the interior design that his company did for Boeing,
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(and they still work with Boeing to this day).
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What’s notable here is that you’ve got an interior of an aircraft, but there’s no aircraft!
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This is all mocked up in a warehouse. It’s the experience of an airplane without the airplane.
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In creating this prototype, they brought in a number of users, and had people come on with luggage
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and try out the experience of the airplane, where they would sit down, take their seats for the length
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of a cross-country flight, and flight attendants would come through to offer them food and other amenities,
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and you could see things like “Are the aisles wide enough?”,
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“Are the seats comfortable?”, “Will the luggage racks carry the luggage that’s necessary?”
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Walter Teague wasn’t the only industrial designer to be able to use these large prototypes of scale.
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Many of the designers creating ocean-going vessels tried the same strategy
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of prototyping interiors in warehouses, and in fact as Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs reports,
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when Apple was creating its first retail stores, they got some warehouse space outside of San Jose,
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and every week went to a fake retail store to try out the retail experience in advance of first opening,
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and one of the things that that biography reports about the retail experience at Apple was,
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by the virtue of prototyping it and trying out different configurations of the store, the Apple team realized
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that the stores can be configured around activities — such as music — rather than around individual products,
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and this significantly changed the layout of the Apple Stores prior to their opening.
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Linus Pauling may be the premier chemist in the 20th century.
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He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on describing the nature of chemical bonds.
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What his work philosophy shares with that of professional designers
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is the practice of trying out multiple alternative ideas, approaches, and solution strategies.
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As he says here, “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”
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And we see that here in a hundred different prototypes that the design firm IDEO produced for Microsoft
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when it was creating its first mouse.
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There are a number of form alternatives that it explored — symmetric versus assymetric designs,
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ones that emphasize ergonomics versus others that emphasize style —
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and being able to see all of these alternatives and hold them in one’s hand
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helped Microsoft figure out which design was the best fit for it to release the mouse with.
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For the geeks in the audience: You can think about this kind of rapid prototyping strategy that we’re talking about
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as being kind of like simulated annealing, where you have a space of possible options,
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some of them better than the others, and what often happens with serial iterative deisgn
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is that you can hillclimb to the best one.
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But local improvement isn’t enough:
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You need to be able to hop around the design space and try wildly different alternatives.
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That way you can find the global maximum.
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When you’re creating a prototyping strategy, it’s important to think about the cost of change over time.
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For physical products —— like a car, a toaster —, the cost of making changes rises dramatically over time
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throughout the design process, and even more significantly upon release.
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With desktop software that gets distributed on, say, a CDROM, the cost rises aren’t quite so dramatic,
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but it’s still pretty significant, harder to make changes as you go throughout the design process,
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and much more difficult once you’ve shipped it out to consumers.
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Web sites, and other forms of software as a service, make it much easier to make changes over time.
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But the costs and difficulty of making changes is still increasing for a number of reasons.
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One of the most important is that people get used to a particular piece of software over time.
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And so even if you could change it easily, you’d upset and confuse a significant user base.
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The same is true for developers [of] any software that has API’s that people are writing applications on top of.
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Once people get used to it, or have built things that rely on a piece of software,
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it becomes more difficult to change.
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Altogether, what this means is that you want to create a design process
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where you’re making your biggest changes early,
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and as you build momentum with users, you’re continuing to refine,
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and adapt, and tweak, and improve your system as it goes on.
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I think I can sum up the introductory message of this framing video in one sentence:
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It’s that “prototypes are questions; ask lots of them.”
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We’ll see you next time.
