Last night I listened to an old friend’s record collection. I haven’t seen him for over 15 years, but we’re connected on Facebook and we both use Spotify. Spotify has just added the facility to connect with your Facebook connections and share music. My friend publishes his ‘collection’ and anyone connected can peruse the list.

Recently I’ve been interviewing teachers about the way their students (11-16) use technology. Almost all the students have mobile phones and the vast majority use Facebook in some format on those phones. In fact 50% of mobile internet traffic in the UK is on Facebook.

In this video, Erik Qualman – author of Socialnomics – asks: Is social media a fad or the biggest shift since the industrial revolution?

Smart.fm iPhone App from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

1. Prototyping improves your designs. Apple are renown for innovative design. They made 100 prototypes of the MacBook prior to production.
2. Prototyping facilitates communication. Project teams have something to focus on and discuss rather than a 200 page document. Designers can explain ideas by doing rather than talking.
3. Prototypes can be tested with users and refined before the project goes into production – saving time and money.
4. Prototypes help assess technical feasibility and reduce development time. Development teams can see what they need to build, enabling more accurate quotes and planning.

Get the prototype right and the rest will follow…

Well this is just a little post to stand up for thinking small! Attention to detail is a crucial part of defining an experience. Get the visuals pixel perfect, craft concise and useful micro-copy, structure your crumb trails perfectly and ensure javascript interactions are optimised and efficient and so on etc.

And the inspiration for writing this post? Mission critical stuff: I added a new favicon to this site : )

The idea is that everyone takes a bit of time to think about how the product of service you are about to design digitally would look if it were to be a physical product on the shelves of a supermarket.

To make this work, it’s best to take along pre-prepared blank boxes to the session – just turn some cereal packets inside out – a great excuse to buy copious amounts of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes!

If some of the participants find this exercise a bit fluffy, don’t sweat it. It’s just a quick way of seeing how they’re thinking about the product at that moment in time. It will generate conversation and drawing out issues that need to be resolved.

I’m fortunate enough to have a ticket and I’m looking forward to talking shop with as many people as possible.

Edenbee.com needed to engage an environmentally conscious community inside Facebook. They wanted to build an application that would allow users to create and share green goals.

Teaming up with top-notch clientside developer Robeam, we popped over to Dublin to run a workshop with the Edenbee team, where we tried to nail down who would use the app and get an idea of how it might be structured. Brainstorming was facilitated by the best fish stew in Dublin, lots of coffee and scribbling on walls…

After the workshop we went away and designed some draft personas and user journeys. A few rounds of amends later we were ready to create a full prototype of the application, on which we then ran a round of usability testing / user research.

Sample User Journey

Sample Wireframe of Goal page

Thanks for the link Fergus