27Jan/100

Collaborative Sketching & Prototyping done right

During late 2009 and now early in 2010 wireframing and prototyping have been a big subject on the part of creating and developing software. I’ve writen about website wireframes in the past sharing reasons, examples and tools about the subject.
Recently I’ve noticed that there’s been allot of interest and articles about collaborative wire-framing.

To be honest from what I've seen collaborative prototyping isn't that collaborative. Normally there's one specialized individual making wireframes according to what they find to be best practices on the web. What happens in most cases is you talk to one maybe 2 people and say "Hey what do you think?", when everything seems right you pass it to design and tell them to work their magic. So collaborating your work with other people that will certainly suggest something that goes against what you find to be the best practices doesn't sound that exciting. At this point you have spent some time prototyping and decided to pass it to design and suddenly someone from marketing looks at it and understands that what the client wants from a certain part of their website is something a little different from what you prototyped. What do you do know? I'll leave that question for you to answer.

The following video is a 24 minute presentation by Todd Zaki Warfel on Washington University where he shares his insights on collaborative web prototyping and the importance of collecting multiple insights from all the team members to help you achieve an improved result.

If you are interested in knowing more about this subject please consider visiting my article on website wireframes.

Also consider acquiring Todd Zaki Warfel book Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide, it's a very interesting reading that provides you with insights on prototyping, the tools used and basic help to those getting started.