Prototype Stage Blog

Prototyping has been very helpful to me and my group in the development of our idea. We actually completely changed our idea because of our original prototype discussions. We began believing that we were going to build a room for an elderly person that could be quickly updated to suite the individuals medical condition. Through our preliminary talks about building the prototype we decided that not only would building a room that had fold out walls and adjustable furniture be very difficult, but it was just not as innovative of an idea as we wanted. As we were talking about how we all weren’t big fans of the room idea, Jenna came up with an idea to develop an app that can be used by the residents to do a huge variety of things from reserving tennis courts, to calling a nurse for emergencies. We fell in love with this idea and the prototyping process has helped hammer out the details. We began by listing the capabilities that we wanted our app to have and once decided on those we started to hash out which pages we wanted to include. By drawing on the board and actually drawing each page we decided which were essential, which we could combine, and which did not need to be included. I believe this step was the most crucial because not only did it really lock in the parameters of our prototype, but it helped us visualize each page and gave us an idea of how the final product was going to look. Our final product is going to be a slide show and on each slide there will be a phone that has a page from the app portrayed. The prototype stage has not provided us with a great idea as the direction of our project, but the building of the prototype actually helped in idea generation and creativity. Our last in class work day was probably one of the most productive days in the class we have had so far and it is because of the freedom the prototype stage gave our team.