Wireframing and Prototyping
- Edinburgh: Friday, March 23
- San Francisco: Friday, April 6
- Amsterdam: Wednesday, April 25
Marieke McCloskey
Hoa Loranger
Full-Day Training Course
Want to catch major usability problems before they become costly to fix? Wireframing and paper prototyping (also known as
low-fidelity prototyping) is a low-cost, rapid iterative design technique that offers one of the best and most
cost-effective methods for gaining design insight early in the design process.
Prototyping allows you to identify major usability problems before your company spends enormous amounts
of time, effort, and money developing and coding user interfaces.
In this tutorial, you’ll discover how to use paper prototyping to foster improved teamwork across
multi-disciplinary teams, and how it can save your company substantial time and money.
What You’ll Learn
In this session, you’ll learn:
- How low-fidelity prototypes can shorten development time
- Tips and tricks for creating paper prototypes quickly
- How prototypes can facilitate creativity and build consensus among team members
- How to effectively conduct studies using wireframes and prototypes
Course Outline
- The who, what, where, when, and why of prototyping
- Who should be involved in creating and testing prototypes?
- What are prototypes and what do they look like?
- Where and when in the design process should you use wireframes?
- Why does low-fidelity prototyping matter to your business, end users, and multi-disciplinary teams?
- Planning paper prototype studies
- Setting goals to balance business and user needs
- Defining user profiles and recruiting criteria
- Creating test plans and schedules
- Creating paper prototypes
- How to create prototypes
- Paper prototyping materials
- Tricks and tips for creating prototypes
- Conducting the study
- How to conduct paper prototyping studies
- Facilitation techniques
- Differences between testing with paper prototypes and real or live products
Format
This full-day tutorial combines lectures and exercises, and includes materials
for creating and testing design prototypes. Participants will gain hands-on experience with paper
prototyping techniques so they can apply the knowledge directly to their own design challenges.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides and a free copy of our
32-minute DVD video on paper prototyping
(a US$68 value)
Who Should Attend
This tutorial is aimed at Web and software developers, designers, project
managers, and other professionals who have basic usability testing skills, but have never created
or tested paper prototypes.
Attendees must have a general understanding of Web or software applications, because most of
the examples and exercises will be drawn from them. Participants should also be interested in
exploring the use of rapid design techniques.
Instructors
Marieke McCloskey is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.
She works with clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials about user
experience, usability research methods, writing for the Web, Intranet design, and the
psychology of users. McCloskey has conducted usability studies, including eyetracking,
in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
She has been a researcher and co-author of several NN/g reports, including
College Students on the Web and
Intranet Usability Guidelines
Before joining NN/g, McCloskey was an Information Architect in the Digital Media Group at the
National Football League, where she worked on several large-scale website redesign projects.
She has also worked as a psychometrician at Massachusetts General Hospital. McCloskey holds an
M.A. in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University, where she explored the use of
neuroimaging to study human behavior and cognition, and a B.S. from University College
Utrecht, in The Netherlands. McCloskey is based in Los Angeles, California.
Presenting in Edinburgh and Amsterdam.
Hoa Loranger is a Director at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the San Diego office. Loranger has
consulted with many large, well-known companies in such areas as finance, customer support, intranets,
e-commerce, entertainment, and technology. She has conducted international usability research worldwide and has given
keynote presentations and tutorials on a wide range of topics, including user testing, paper prototyping, and fundamentals
of Web usability. She coauthored the book Prioritizing Web Usability
(New Riders Press) and has written reports on design for Flash-based
applications, investor relations,
“about us” pages,
B2B websites,
location finders, and
teens.
Before joining NN/g, she served as human factors lead for Intuit’s Consumer Tax and Small Business Division,
where her group was responsible for user-interaction and visual design for the TurboTax product line. At TRW
(now part of Northrop Grumman), she specialized in both hardware and software systems, including navigational
applications and computer configurations in military vehicles. Loranger earned an M.A. in human factors and applied
experimental psychology from California State University, Northridge, and a B.A. in psychology from University of California, Irvine.
Presenting in San Francisco.
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