People is easilly impressed by technology

This (the title of this post) is what a teacher told us when we show him a software prototype in an early stage of the design process.

If we want a good feedback of our product, what should we show to the user during an interview?

What happens if you show a software prototype to an user? A software prototype is something that gives the impression of a “finished product”. So if during an interview you give them a software inside a computer they will only say “It’s nice, It’s cool, I like it” but no any useful information.

A prototype by definition must look unfinished and several kind of mockups could be useful. This means from paper mock-ups to simple boxes.

““In summary mock-ups become useful when
they make sense to the participants in a specific
design language game, not because they mirror
“real things”, but because of the interaction and
reflection they support.”“

I was sceptical about the amount of information that those primitive sketches could provide us. But they revealed as a good tool both to communicate between  the team and to test several use qualities without the time-costing process of writing a software.  This doesn’t exclude the software prototypes, only postpone them until a later stage.

Another question that I wonder yesterday was: “If I want to get the user attention during participative design, a good way is impress with eye-candy technology”, so “what to do” is never written in a book.