Articles:Interview About Prototyping and Usability with Jenova Chen
From unthinkMedia
Due to being based on a school project (http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/), Jenova went with a connivence approach of user testing leading up to Beta testing.
- Mentor/Peer Review
- Friends and Family
- Beta Testing
Feedback was pivotal in identifying problem with gaming mechanics on an earlier iteration called Traffic Light, where users could could control the difficulty of the game with a scrollbar. In Fl0w he decided to integrate the functionally deeper in the game mechanics.
process
His iterative process is pretty standard
- Design
- Implement
- Test
- Repeat
prototyping
Jenova believes it is only work prototyping features that are somewhat risky, and may when there may be other design decisions are depending on this feature. I agree with this, in a fairy tale world you would have the option to test everything, but due to budgets and time constraints that is typically not the case. Bellow are the 4 areas that Jenova decided to test on fl0w.
- Visual Prototype: test the system limitations
- Control Prototype: testing out movement and fluidity of controls
- Game Play Prototype: Sandbox for testing game mechanics
- Sound Prototype: Creating audio prototypes and share with experts for critique
It is important to note that, since this is a prototype you need to express the intent of the prototype, and identify any bugs or flaws that might cause your tester to loose focus on their tasks.
