Thomas Davies

Paper Prototyping for Mobile

After experimenting with paper prototyping in my second year usability assignments, I wrote an article for UX Booth discussing the advantages of using the technique when developing mobile apps and how adapting the method can yield great results.

Extract:

Prototyping is key to any successful design. Paper prototyping is usually the first step, but does it fit into a world where mobile devices are king? Yes, but not using the conventional method. Combine the physicality of the device and the power of paper prototyping and you have a solution that’s fit for the new era of computing.

View the article on UX Booth.

Mozilla Labs Design Challenge

Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - Design Brief

Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing.

You can find out more about the design challenge here.

Expert Review on an iPad Game

Heuristic Evaluation on Deadball Specialist HD

Deadball Specialist HD is a game developed by Full Fat Games’ for the iPad. The user takes the role of a free kick taker and attempts to hit targets in the net.

I conducted a very short heuristic evaluation on the app, utilising Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics on an iPad with iOS 3.2.

Documenting 5 violations, I assessed their severity and suggested recommendations that could alleviate the issues found.

View the results document on Scribd.

View the methodology and results document on Scribd.