John McRee – UXD

There’s this friggen icon bouncing in my dock all the time. It’s called the Adobe Updater. I have to basically stop everything I’m doing in order to make updates, so I choose to ignore it as often as I can. Finally I relent and shut down just about everything so I can get updates on some dumb thing that I’ll likely NOT use in some Adobe app I rarely open. Ha!

Im typing an email when I notice the damn thing bouncing again. I stop what I’m doing and see that it’s an alert, telling me that it’s… finished. I click “Okay.” WHAT THE F-CK?!!? What a waste of my time and attention. Leave me alone! Did Adobe steal these designers from Microsoft or something?

I have seen it in action and it works very well, but it’s hard to convince some folks that hand-drawn prototypes are just as effective as Photoshop mockups for interaction and information design testing.

I was able to dig up a paper from researchers at Berkeley who did some empirical testing and found that there are no significant differences in test results using low-fi vs. high-fi prototypes.  Read it yourself.

Download the PDF