Design, Develop, Create

Thursday 3 October 2019

Exercise: (a) Design your ideal search page

This exercise familiarises students with interface design approaches and tools. The exercise is inspired by Carol Snyder's book titled "Paper Prototyping" (2003).

Objective
To practice creating design artifacts to display and test technology use/interaction ideas.

Material
Sheets of A4 paper, post-it notes, pens and pencils of different colours.

Instructions
1. In groups of 2 or 3 use paper/pencil sketch a mockup of a basic Internet ‘search page’. (allocate 10")
2. Collect the sketches and display them to the class; allow the group to provide a brief commentary. (allocate 10" to display all mockups).
3. In the same groups use Balsamiq to create a digital version of the design. The new design may vary from the paper/pencil sketch. (allocate 15")
4. Discuss the following reflection points (in groups first followed by class discussion). (allocate 10")

Reflection
Describe your feelings and thoughts on the process of translating your ideas into a concrete representation.
Comment on the discussion dynamics within the group.
How did the tool used shape, constrain or enable your design thinking?
Consider the difference between paper/pencil sketch vs Balsamiq.

References
Snyder, C. (2003) Paper Prototyping: The fast and easy way to design and refine user interfaces, San Francisco, CA, Morgan Kaufmann, Elsevier Science.



Student Examples

Whole class examples in collage:
designdiagrams01