Month: February 2020

This week, I learned a lot about prototypes and their benefits. Depending on your product, the prototype you use can come in many different formats, but any prototype you make will be able to give you a lot of insight into your design. They can be used to see how users might interact with or interpret your designs, and then they can give you feedback about aspects they like or questions, ideas, or suggestions that they might have. One quote from IDEO that stood out to me was, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.” This really shows that prototypes can give you unique insights – and lots of them!

Something that stood out to me this week was that design is always changing and evolving. Just like art is more meaningful when you understand the context it was created in, design is influenced by the culture and context it is created in as well.

This week, what stood out to me was realizing how important the relationship between the designer and the user really is. Designers ultimately have so much control over how their product is received. In order to deliver the best product for their consumer, designers can use personas, prototypes, storyboards, and a myriad of other approaches to get to know what the user really wants. Another great way to do this is to partner with the users themselves and involve them in the design process, as seen in some of our resources this week like the Umpqua Bank case study and the Mobius Motors vehicle designed by Joel Jackson.