CHAPTER 8 – ENVISIONMENT

Envisionment is concerned with making ideas visible with expressing the designer’s
thoughts about the system.

BASIC TECHNIQUES

 Sketches and snapshots

 Storyboards
o These are taken from filmmaking. They use cartoon like structures
where key movements are represented.
o Advantage:
 They allow you to get a feel for the flow of the interaction.
o Types:
 Traditional storyboards
• Notes are attached to each scene explaining what goes
on in that scene.
 Scored storyboards
• These are used if the application has a lot of moving
graphics.
• The graphics’ characteristics would be explained. E.g,
colours used, images, sound etc.
 Text-only storyboards
• These are appropriate if the application has a lot of very
complex sequences of events.
 Mood boards
• Widely used in advertising and interior design
• Used to gather visually stimulating features that capture
how you feel about the design.
• The point of mood boards is not to formally represent
aspects of design, but it is aimed to act as inspiration
motivating designers’ thoughts.
 Navigation maps
• Focus on how people move through a website or an
application..
• The aim is to focus on how people will experience the
website or application.
• Each page in the website or location in an application is
represented with a box or heading and every page that
can be accessed from that page should flow from it.
 • It is best to put in all flows possible (back and forward
from a page). This will highlight sections where people
might get stranded.
• Navigation maps can be used with scenarios to walk
through partial activities and are a good way of spotting
poor aspects of design such as dead ends.

PROTOTYPES

 These are concrete but partial representations or implementations of a system

design.
 It may be used to demonstrate a concept (e.g. prototype car) in early design,
to test details of that stage and sometimes as a specification for the final
product.
 Developed using paper, cardboard or other suitable material or can be
developed using sophisticated software.
 For the design team, representations like navigation maps and flow charts
might be meaningful, but for clients and ordinary people some form of
prototype is crucial for capturing the outcomes of envisioning techniques.

There are two types of prototyping:

High-fidelity (Hi-fi)
Low-fidelity (Lo-fi)

 High-fidelity prototype
o The look and feel of the prototype is very similar to the final product
o It is produced in software that will allow interaction to be conducted
easily

Key Features:

• Useful for detailed evaluation

• It is kind of the final design which the client should agree on before the
final implementation
• It is developed well into the project when ideas are beginning to firm
up.

Problems:

•People believe them. This is dangerous if the designers have not

checked details clearly beforehand.
• This leads to clients being confused about the system and what it
should do.
 Low-fidelity prototype
o These are paper prototypes
Key Features:

• They focus on broad design ideas

• They are designed to be produced quickly and thrown away just as
quickly.
• They capture very early design ideas.
• They should help the process of gathering and evaluating many
possible design solutions.

Problems:

• If a paper prototype is going to be handled by many people, it needs to

be of strong material.
• It focuses on broad issues and key elements; if you want it to be
detailed it can be hard for users to understand it.
• It should have sections on the paper prototype adjustable so that
people viewing it can redesign it on the go.

e.g. using sticky notes to represent parts of the screen where the user
can move elements around or add new items.