By Hillary Johnson
Last weekend, Chris and I attended a marvelous event called Dare 2B Digital, aimed at addressing the gender gap in computer science careers, and at which 7th through 10th grade girls got to play at writing code, crafting business plans, and other techie things.
What's a good mother/son spring break activity? Why, going to Startup Weekend and spending 50 hours building a company with ten total strangers. Perfect because my 17 year-old vastly prefers the company of adults to that of other teenagers, and because he's been on the high school treadmill for so long that I thought it would be nice for him to see what the light at the end of the tunnel might look like–that the world of work can be a rather thrilling place.
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I occasionally still get calls to do software development. Recently, a potential client indicated that they would like a Windows shell extension created in C#. I’ve never built a shell extension, nor done any C#. Before meeting with the client, I decided I should take an hour or two to see how hard it would be for an old-school C++ and COM guy like me to get up to speed.
I downloaded the ‘Express’ version of C# and started playing with it. Pretty quickly, I had a command line app that worked like Eliza, but got the response text from Google searches. Fun!
LinkedIn has a cool feature that let’s you ask a question of your whole network. This morning, someone in my network asked this question:
Tools for visualising interactive prototypes? What do you prefer?
Powerpoint, ConceptDraw, Omnigraffle, Flash, Ruby on Rails?
We are reviewing the tools we are using to help visualise interactive storyboards and concepts for our clients. What are other people using? How important is it that the tool supports experimenting with real data and conditional branching in order to explore with the development team the consequences of their design decisions?
My reply:
Consider Paper Prototyping.
It is low cost, easy to do, and will quickly teach you how a real user will react to the system. With a paper prototype, a human acts as the computer, so your prototype can support some very sophisticated logic without the need to create code. Modifications are trivial, encouraging experimentation, discovery and improvement. I was skeptical at first, but after using it a few times I have become impressed with the power of this tool.