[Sigia-l] love thy client (was Re: [Sigia-l] "Study: ContentManagement Tools Fail")

[John O'Donovan]

I understand there to be different types of prototyping and they all have
validity. I do believe that a prototype should be more than UI though and
believe in iteration of development rather than just prototyping. For
example:

- If you build a prototype too early will it influence and "swamp" user
thinking?
- How well do you understand the business before you draw up a prototype?
- When does the tweaking end and how do you know this is not a premature
evaluation?
- How do you mitigate development risk if you have not tested anything out?
- How do you know that you could not have done more if you have only
prototyped the interface? What else could the developers do for the users?
- How prepared are you to take it apart and approach it from a different
angle?

Just thoughts. Would be interested to hear your thoughts on the above.

Prototypes won't help you uncover the development risks if they are just UI
and won't bring out all the issues - even political.

If you use the prototype as a requirements engineering tool then you should
prototype at least key features of the rest of the system as well. However
this is not always possible, so iteration allows you to say I'll build this
version with this much functionality and then go round the loop again and
learn from that experience.

Cheers,

jod