Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
Assignment #4: Goal to make an interactive digital prototype of a mobile application
Everyone should do this assignment on thier own
Take this paper
prototype developed in class and realize it as a digital
interactive prototype in Balsamiq. Here is a link to a
movie in which I describe what's going on in the
prototype.
Download the free trial version of Balsamiq. It will
work for 7 days. Buy it if you like it. I don't think the
web based version will allow you to save to pdf.
Implement the paper prototype with interactive
linking. Iterate on this design to make it better and to
make it reflect your style as an interaction designer.
Here are two prototypes from class that might help
you think through some of the options
The first page of the interaction should be a
description of how your style influenced the prototype.
Where did you intentionally deviate from the paper prototype? Why?
Here (.pdf) is an example of a mockup of our post-it note
example. View it in one-page up, full-screen mode. Notice that it has several views and the buttons
are active. The initial description in this example would
not be nearly sufficient for your submission. I anticipate
that yours would be several paragraphs or many bullet
points.
Grading will be based on your execution of transforming
the paper prototype into a digital prototype. This isn't
about copying the paper prototype, each prototype
iteration should get better, but it should match the form
and function of the paper prototype. If you decide to
change the flow, the views or the style, it better be
clearly better and well explained. When we grade
these we will be evaluating things such as:
Did you submit a pdf?
Did you justify your choices?
Do all the links work (even when making them work
is a pain)?
Is it professional looking? Are buttons
aligned? Are fonts big enough? Is the text
grammatically correct and spelled properly?
Is the application completely mocked-up? Are
there missing elements or dead-ends?
Are there sufficient intermediate elements to
show processing and the input process?