Pixar’s approach to prototyping
Adaptive Path have posted an interview with one of the lead developers at Pixar. In the interview they discuss prototyping at length. Here are the key excerpts for me:
PIXAR Our prototype exists in the same medium as our final product. This allows us to judge it by the same standards that the final film will be judged.
I think this is an important lesson for a User Experience Designer to understand – paper prototypes and ethnographic research are great, but if you’re trying to build a prototype that you want use as a blueprint, it should exist in the same medium as the final product.
AP At Adaptive Path, we’ve been moving towards this approach ourselves. As the experiences we design get necessarily more complex, it’s not sufficient to design them as static sketches, and hand them off to others to implement. We’ve been creating richer and richer prototypes, not as an end-product of design, but as a step in design exploration. If you’re going to design for experience, you’ve got to understand what it means to physically engage with your design as quickly as possible, and be prepared to change those designs as need be.
PIXAR We know we’ll fail a lot; if you don’t fail you’re not doing anything new. We’d much rather fail with a bunch of sketches that we did (relatively) quickly and cheaply, than once we’ve modeled, rigged, shaded, animated, and lit the film.
This gets to the heart of why I create rapid prototypes in Flash. Rapid prototyping is the best way to explore and test ideas without investing major resources or becoming too committed to a particular solution.
Flash, in my experience, is the best tool because it can perfectly simulate the final experience, unlike paper prototypes or even wireframes. It’s also much easier, faster and less distracting to produce than HTML prototypes. HTML prototypes may provide a more accurate representation of the final product, but that’s exactly the problem – they require nearly the same level of effort as building the final product – you end up focusing far too much time and effort building it, instead of exploring a broader range of options.
Flash lets you combine the agility of sketching on paper (it’s a drawing tool) with the technical precision of delivering an on-screen experience (it’s a scriptable piece of software).
Let us know what you think...