Refresh 030 — Rapid Prototyping and Customer Development: The Hacker’s Guide to Software Design August 26, 2010

With current technology, it is easy to build too much software, too fast. You can quickly get into a client project without helping them clearly think through their needs and goals. It is also possible to spend so much time planning a project that you never get to the hard work of actually building it.

Rapid prototyping and customer development come to our aid here. The concept is simple. Build the smallest thing possible that is at the core of the business idea and do it in a way that gives a sense of what the whole product will be. Then get it to your clients and encourage them to talk with their customers about it. Then rinse and repeat.

John will give a brief introduction and the describe techniques for putting the concept into practice. In particular, he’ll talk about using wireframes, paper prototypes, HTML prototypes, and dummy applications, as well as some designer to developer work flows.

Speaker:
John W. Long is a software developer and designer. He spends most of his time on the design side, but he can’t get away from dabbling in Ruby and Javascript. He is passionate about user-driven design and helping clients build successful businesses. John is the proprietor of http://wiseheartdesign, the creator of Radiant CMS, and an active contributor to open source.