Prototypes

What are the types of prototypes and what are the used for?

Role: Used to give "testers" the basic concept of your product. Al of my prototypes that I made for class today are role prototypes because I don't know what the actual interface will look like. I am not ready to implement them yet, but I want my classmate to look at them- understand my intent and then decide if they are good ideas or not so I can either continue to pursue them or not.

Look and Feel: Used to give testers an idea of what elements of, or the entire product will actually look like. The reading gave the weighted pizza box as a prototype for a laptop as an example. I am thinking of how at work (The Institute of Play) they are making prototypes of a taxonomy tool for teachers and in the first round (role) it was essentially a chart, now they are building logos, avatars and icons to replace items on the chart so that it will be more realistic/ user friendly for teachers.

Implementation: Used to give testers a sense of what the project will look like, feel like and behave. This is a close setting to the final iteration. Here, this could be a beta version of a database- it has all the strappings of a regular database but it is put out to catch areas needed for debugging and user friendliness.

Often a prototype will not sit cleanly in the rubric for prototypes that I listed above. Really, the ultimate goal is to answer pre-determined design questions to move forward the iterative process. So, if you had rollerskates, you can have the rollerskates that actually work, but with different design elements on either side. This would allow for a balance between the role - the look and feel and implementation questions.