[Sigia-l] rapid prototyping by business managers

[HK Dunston]

Hello,

As I see it, my client's desire for early prototyping sounds great on the
surface. Who doesn't think better definition leads to a better product? The
issue isn't whether or not it's good to demonstrate possible functionality
to users and stakeholders early in the project. I think that point has been
made persuasively many times before now.

There are 2 difficulties that I'm trying to address:

The first one was well described by Ralph Lord and Matthew Rehkopf in
previous posts, e.g.:

----- On Thursday, November 13, 2003 10:45 AM Ralph Lord wrote: ----- 
Everyone I know has horror stories of clients/customers/friends who just
could not be dissuaded that the mockup/prototype they were seeing wasn't
almost ready to ship.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-

I think terminology suggestions like "conceptual model" and "sketch" are
very useful -- as are the comments about setting expectations, especially
when it concerns clients who have never been involved in a software
development project.

The other difficulty may just be more specific to my particular case: the
people building the prototypes will not necessarily have any experience
designing software. In order to demonstrate functionality, don't you need to
make design decisions? If you don't have any experience making design
decisions, isn't there the risk that your prototype will be just as
disorienting and difficult to understand as a badly-designed final product?
If your prototype is disorienting and difficult to understand, how are you
going to get buy-in/approval/sponsorship from the people you're showing it
to? I guess the question is: is the value of demonstration so much greater
than the value of description that a poor demonstration is worth the risk?

--hk