Experience prototyping

In order to better understand experience prototyping I chose the paper titled “Design of an audio-based mobile journey planner application”. The paper looks at increasing the awareness of time and place for commuters using public transportation. They do so by providing participants in Commuting in Helsinki with a mobile application. The application presents information in the form of audio to reduce the commuters need to pay attention to time. The paper then goes on to describe how video prototyping was used as an experience prototyping methodology. They used this methodology in order to result in an application the is “designed properly”. They used video prototyping as the process aids participants in envisioning the proposed designs and changes. “In their use of  technique of video prototyping, a particular continuous interaction is isolated and filmed, and alternative sound designs, be they voice [7], everyday objects, music, downloaded sound samples or parametric sound synthesis, are overlaid on the visuals.

 

They first started with sonic overlays to design the sound of the application. They tested out different personas (tourist, office worker etc) and scenarios. For example, “the office worker sets up the application with the target and desired time of departure, and continues working uninterrupted, since he delegates the tracking of the remaining time and the time to depart to the application.” After the sonic overlay stage the sound and film footage depicting the application and how it would work were edited in to a video displayed to participants. However, since the objective of the paper was to develop the application the authors failed to fully flesh out the use of video prototyping as a methodology as much as I liked. Made me rethink the way we present research in such papers and whether it is the most effective way to reflect on methodologies. Videos and images should be used more extensively in papers that are emphasising their methodologies.

 

All in all, the idea of video prototyping makes sense as it allows the envisioning of the application however does it miss out on the advantages that physical prototypes have such as textual understanding etc.