As of today, Mad Skillz Club has officially risen back from the grave to fight once more for the knowledge of designers everywhere.

Today’s topic is Personas. Not just a “how to,” but an examination of effective communication of design thinking through personas as a tool. Why do we as designers care about personas? What does it mean to use personas in a design and what purpose do they actually serve?

We’ll have a whole hour to create a fleshed out persona today, but luckily for us, Mad Skillz Research Division, Inc. has conducted 6 in-depth studies of our target audience. Their research can be found at this link.

 

With HCI/d Connect round the corner, we’re pleased to have Jeremy Podany do a workshop on interviewing and salary. Join us in the Graduate Design Studio on Friday (3/4) from 4-5 pm.

The Fall 2010 Prototyping Class put up an exhibition of some of their projects on February 4, 2011. Here are some images and videos of the exhibits:

Event date:
February 18, 2011 – 5:30pm – 7:00pm

Location:
Informatics Design Lab
919 E. 10th St.
Bloomington, IN
United States
See map: Google Maps

Event description:

Still riding the interaction11 wave?

Got lots of thoughts and want to share them?

Want to hear what others thought about it?

Didn’t get to go but want to find out what went on?

Join us for a candid reflection of the conference at the design lab in Informatics, which is on the third floor of the new addition. All are welcome.

(Co-organized by IxDA Bloomington and Mad Skillz club)

Due to poor response, Friday’s session on How to present is cancelled. We will resume in January. In the meantime, please continue to suggest topics on the Google Doc. Thanks!

Please vote one of the following two topics. Poll closes 11/16.

Why use clickable prototyping?

Clickable prototyping can get at the experience of a design much better than paper prototyping. While paper prototyping provides a way to explore a space, a clickable prototype allows users to actually interact with your design. This will likely provide better testing results and feedback from your users. Furthermore, it allows people not familiar with your design to jump right in and try it out. Clickable prototypes can be given to stakeholders or developers as a stand-in or augmentation to design specifications. Developers and stakeholders can then play around with your design in order to better understand how it works. Furthermore, clickable prototypes can help facilitate a conversation between designs and stakeholders/developers in order to better the design and iterate on the ideas.

How rapid can it be?

Clickable prototypes can be made in as little as 30 minutes using tools like Keynote or online wireframing tools. Within keynote, prototypes can be any level of fidelity wished from pure sketches that allow for interactivity to photoshop mockups of the actual interface and graphics. The shear quickness of creating these prototypes mean that they can be easily remade or thrown away at very little cost.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Rapid Clickable Prototypes have many strengths; very low cost, ease of reproduction, high fidelity, better testing capabilities, and many more. However, there are also some weaknesses to creating rapid clickable prototypes. Some weaknesses are that they might look to ‘finished’ and therefore assumed to be near ‘product ready’, high fidelity prototypes might not elicit helpful feedback from users, and they do not communicate reasoning behind design decisions.

Examples

GroupView – PDF by John Wayne Hill
Firefox Hometab – keynote example by John Wayne Hill

Resources

From Adobe Fireworks to iPhone
Designing with Keynote
Interactive iPhone Prototype
How to prototype interactive iPad applications
HCID Prototyping Class

Tools

Apple’s Keynote – Part of iWork – trial
Mockingbird
Omnigraffle
Axure
Google Draw
Balsamiq
Other Tools

Hi everyone,

We have only two more MSc live sessions for the rest of the semester! Please vote two topics you would like MSc to cover over these two sessions; the top-voted topic will be covered on 11/19, while the second will be covered on 12/3. Voting closes on 11/12 at 11:59 PM.

We set up a poll to chose a topic for this Friday’s Mad Skillz Club. However, it’s been a little while since that poll. We’ve also noticed that many 1st years could likely use some help on presentations. So, we’ve decided to let you choose once again. Please vote for the topic (of two) you want covered this week. Remember to keep suggesting future items.