I had a negative experience with Usability Engineering, but I believe this to be **strongly** because of the professor I had for it. After choosing to create lo-fidelity (drawings), mid-fidelity (monochromatic, simple diagrams; *roughly* close aesthetic), and hi-fidelity (accurate aesthetics) prototypes for a personal project… I realized not only is the creation of these prototypes fun, but also incredibly useful to understanding multiple aspects of your app:
- The “feel”
- What the audience prefers to look at, aesthetically
- What the audience cares about, content/features
- The different sections of the project
- The main functionalities the tool/product/project serves.
More than anything, it gave me additional opportunities to consider the technical requirements of a certain functionality. For example, when making the login page I had plenty of time to start to consider… Well, how exactly do I want the login process to occur behind-the-scenes? This question wasn’t something I really asked myself until I started looking at login examples, and saw the OAuth 2.0 options, and immediately it was like getting pushed awake. “Oh yea… How do I want that to occur?”
I’m sure there’s more I learned from the development of these models that I don’t immediately recall as well.
Additionally, it feels *so* much more real with prototypes, and it gives a much greater (and more realistic) understanding of the amount of effort that will be needed in order to turn this idea from prototype to product. This alone will immensely help my habit of starting projects and not finishing them!
See the prototype on Figma. Or below in the embedded Figma diagram (which I hope will continue to work after post publication).
