Ms Office Tune Up

The Case:
Your website plan has been approved. Now it is your job to implement the idea. However, before you invest efforts in implementation, you need substantive user feedback early in the development process. You need to facilitate communication within development team and between the development team and customers You also need to design, create, test and communicate the user interfaces.

In short, you need to build a prototype. In this post, you can download a Microsoft Visio web prototyping template.

Tune Up:
In general, prototyping is useful in a wide variety of situations. Its main benefits are that it:

• Is fast and inexpensive
• Identifies problems before they’re coded
• Elicits more and better (i.e., less nitpicky) feedback from users
• Helps developers think creatively
• Gets users and other stakeholders involved early in the process
• Fosters teamwork and communication
• Avoids opinion wars

Prototyping will promote rapid iterative development. You will be able to experiment with many ideas rather than betting the farm on just one. It’s not necessary to be an HCI (human-computer interaction) guru to get started with prototyping. And it does not require any technical skills either. Thus, a multidiciplinary team can work together. It’s a common-sense technique which people in a variety of disciplines can benefit from it. Anyone who is involved in the design, implementation, or support of user interfaces can benefit from paper prototyping because it fosters development of products that are more useful, intuitive, efficient, and pleasing.

It’s important to have at least one person on the core team who has the technical perspective—knows the system architecture, the limits of the technology, what is easy, and what is hard. This will prevent the team from developing a prototype that is impossible to implement.

• If you’re the technical type, realize that other people have good insights about what users want and need, and you really want to get those insights before development is in full swing. The ideas that come from nontechnical people aren’t always useful or workable, but the prototype will sort the wheat from the chaff. Be open to prototyping something even if you’re not sure how to make it work—maybe you’ll be able to use the idea in another form if it works well for users.
• If you’re not technical, remember that interface design is a skill as well as an art. You have a lot to contribute, but not all of your ideas will be practical within the constraints of your development process. Sometimes you’ll have to defer to the techie types when they say, “The architecture doesn’t support it” or “That goes against our style guide.” But don’t be afraid to pick up a pen and scribble a screen if inspiration strikes.

You should include people in addition to those who are directly responsible for the interface design/development. In particular, seek out those who have direct contact with users: sales, marketing, tech support, trainers. These people often have valuable insights about what users want and what confuses them.

The following is a Microsoft Visio template and stencil you can use to make a prototype. Guided by some guidelines, you can adjust the design based on your desired screen resolution.

Free Download:
visio-web-prototyping.zip – MS Visio (315kb)

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