Your assignment at the end of this week is the first stage in a multi-step process towards developing a clickable prototype: coming up with a clearly articulated idea for an app with a specific goal in mind. So this week we will focus on how to articulate and structure your ideas and goals, how to use naming and language as a part of your app’s identity. We will also look at audience research and user centered design.

This week we’re going to continue to develop, plan, and test your app idea. We’ll start by sketching out more extensive content and mapping it into a structure. To test what aspects of your app are working, we’ll look at how to create a non-visual paper prototype and work our way towards a sitemap. While you’re developing the logic of your app, you’ll also begin to develop the look and feel of it: the visual development process.

At this stage in our process we are going to take our site map, look and feel research, and user testing to the next level in order to get a more accurate static prototype. By building a wireframe of our interface, we’ll figure out what goes where, and on which pages, utilizing our user testing information to figure out the hierarchy and structure of our app. This week is about the logic and functionality of our interface, and how it’s actually going to work within the app.

In this final week of the course, you will be taking your wireframes or app screens and make a simple functioning digital prototype to simulate the experience of interactivity. We’ll be using simple prototyping software to put your static screens into a realistic context, and simulating interaction in order to understand how your app feels, in order to troubleshoot and fix problems. This is the part of the course where all your talents come together! For me this is the most exciting part of UI/UX development, when it all starts to become real and you have a believable prototype in your hands.