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An important part of ICONIX Process involves doing some rapid prototyping of the proposed system. This helps the product at several levels: the technical design level (exploring the system’s design and proving it with code early on), the interaction design level (thinking about how the user will interact with the system), and the requirements level (eliciting correct requirements from the customer by showing her what could be produced for her).
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There are also some dangers with GUI prototyping, in particular the following:
Unless the team (and customer and project manager) is very disciplined, it’s tempting to take the prototype, polish it up a bit, and call it the “released system.” We show a more controlled and disciplined way of doing this in the mapplet example in Part 2 of this book.
The customer may see the prototype as a completed project and then get upset that the project is actually going to take months to complete.This issue can be mitigated by setting expectations appropriately, for example, by making sure the prototype looks and feels like a prototype (for an example of this, see Chapter 1, which shows a screenshot using the Napkin Look & Feel).
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Interaction design is an important and oft-neglected part of software development. Often, it’s applied to a project as an afterthought: “Right. We’ve created our system; now let’s make it look nice.” Of course, interaction design is about much more than just the look of a product’s UI. It’s about how the user will interact with the system to achieve his goals. It’s also about analyzing exactly what those goals are.
In this chapter, we look at a specific interaction design artifact, the persona, and examine how it can be applied to ICONIX Process. In so doing, we define an extension to ICONIX Process intended for projects that require a large amount of interaction design. This process would benefit products that are being targeted at multiple customers, because the techniques described in this chapter help to keep the UI focused on a small group of users. Having said that, the process should also benefit custom business software projects.
We’ll write some personas for the mapplet example (these personas were used to help drive release 2 of the mapplet; see Chapter 8, this work formed the basis for the second release of the mapplet.
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