SILBERBAUER SAYS:

CPR to the stalled process: Real time prototyping  

Klaus Silberbauer / Thursday, September 28, 2006

Over the last two weeks me and a colleague have executed four workshops with a client who is building a complex B2B portal. The client has for some time been working on the concept and business model but as the process needed to move forward into design we were called in to take the process to the next level - and to do this quickly as deadline was approaching mightily fast.

As the concept was not entirely documented but mostly existed inside the project team members' minds, our design process had to be very flexible to allow for sudden changes in scope and strategy.

We soon realized that we needed to get very visual indeed to shift the team members from strategic thinking into design mode (from the "what and why"-mode to the "how"-mode), and that we also needed a lot of face time with the client to understand the complex organisational needs without doing a some thorough analysis first. So we simply brought a laptop with Axure RP 4.2, a projector and a Wacom digitizer and did 4 x 5 hours of intense rapid prototyping with the client.

We were 2 of us, 3 of them and, very importantly, the head of the company that eventually will implement the system: A skilled system architect with a great understanding of the need for IA and interaction design. We've worked with him before and it's always a pleasure (I can't mention names here, but he'll know who he is :-)

He and I lead the discussion while my colleague prototyped like mad in Axure, constantly reflecting the team's decisions on the screen (he' pretty fast in Axure - and one needs to be to keep up with 5 team members constantly changing their minds).

The first couple of hours of workshop one went by without much progress but suddenly the site started to emerge on the screen. Today we concluded the fourth and final workshop and I must say that this approach really has moved the project forward.

Live prototyping with a team of 6 is not the cheapest way to do it, but there no question that both the project and the quality of the IA and the design have benefitted from this approach.

Anyway: Tomorrow I leave for Berlin to attend the second European Information Architecture Summit. Two days of fun and educating stuff, I hope. And the IA happy hour friday evening. What's a summit without hang overs?

I'll blog about this event when I'll get back, but please be patient - the next week is screwed up schedule-wise so we might reach the weekend before any posts appear.