Sunday, December 18, 2005
Please No More Mockups!
There comes a time in the life of every new software project when mockups just don't cut it anymore.
I've observed that this time usually coincides with a period 1-2 presentations before people watching begin to wonder "these pretty mockups are all well and good, but when can I expect to see the real thing?"
For Ping, mockups have been an incredibly useful exercise. They've helped us to design, test, and rework major portions of our user experience (mainly UI + navigational paradigm), and to push additional requirements back into the web service that will power the project -- something much easier to do in Photoshop and Illustrator than Visual Studio!
But enough is enough, and it's time to move from mockups to code, and here's the plan for our next short-term milestone:
- I've begun to model our stack-based navigational paradigm in C# / .NET Compact Framework. When this is complete, we should have a completely navigable Windows Mobile application - though it won't be pretty, or functional.
- Jill is beginning to build .NET Compact Framework forms based on her amazing set of mockups.
- Jeff, from the mates project, is beginning to re-write the mates server proof of concept into production-quality C#/MS SQL code, taking into account a few changes/additions we've requested to the web service.
Ideally, once we've each finished our tasks, we'll have a pretty and functional barebones application, at which point we'll probably do another round of usability testing, and begin to bake in the necessary bells and whistles required to ship a beta.
Now back to living in Visual Studio for me...
I've observed that this time usually coincides with a period 1-2 presentations before people watching begin to wonder "these pretty mockups are all well and good, but when can I expect to see the real thing?"
For Ping, mockups have been an incredibly useful exercise. They've helped us to design, test, and rework major portions of our user experience (mainly UI + navigational paradigm), and to push additional requirements back into the web service that will power the project -- something much easier to do in Photoshop and Illustrator than Visual Studio!
But enough is enough, and it's time to move from mockups to code, and here's the plan for our next short-term milestone:
- I've begun to model our stack-based navigational paradigm in C# / .NET Compact Framework. When this is complete, we should have a completely navigable Windows Mobile application - though it won't be pretty, or functional.
- Jill is beginning to build .NET Compact Framework forms based on her amazing set of mockups.
- Jeff, from the mates project, is beginning to re-write the mates server proof of concept into production-quality C#/MS SQL code, taking into account a few changes/additions we've requested to the web service.
Ideally, once we've each finished our tasks, we'll have a pretty and functional barebones application, at which point we'll probably do another round of usability testing, and begin to bake in the necessary bells and whistles required to ship a beta.
Now back to living in Visual Studio for me...
