FIT5152 Chap.5 Design Methods and Prototyping
Design Methods and Prototyping
Week 5 asks how design work should be organised. The seminar contrasts the waterfall model, with its separate phases borrowed from manufacturing, with iterative user-centred design, which repeats a cycle of understanding, specifying, designing and evaluating so that discoveries about users can still change the product.
It then introduces process frameworks: Agile UX runs user stories as mini-projects inside short sprints with daily stand-ups, while Lean UX, born in the Toyota Production System, aims for quick delivery of something testable, stated as a hypothesis and built as a minimum viable product.
Kanban boards and acceptance criteria keep the work visible.
The Google Design Sprint packages these ideas into six stages, understand, define, sketch, decide, prototype and validate, each with its own methods, from How Might We notes and affinity clustering to Crazy 8s, dot voting and the choice between a rumble and an all-in-one prototype.
The final section covers prototypes themselves: what fidelity means, why higher fidelity raises cost and attachment, how horizontal and vertical prototypes trade breadth against depth, and when paper, PICTIVE sessions, digital wireframes, interactive mockups, native builds or a Wizard of Oz setup fit best. Submission 2 asks for hand-drawn low-fidelity screens, so this week explains why paper comes first.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Waterfall and iterative user-centred design
- 02
Agile UX, Scrum and kanban
- 03
Lean UX hypotheses and minimum viable products
- 04
The six stages of the design sprint
- 05
Sprint methods from How Might We to dot voting
- 06
Prototype fidelity, breadth and depth
Worked example · free
Writing a Lean UX hypothesis and its minimum viable product
- 1Hypothesis: “We believe that showing each borrower’s return history, for neighbours who lend tools, will produce more first-time loans to strangers.”
- 1Minimum viable product: a clickable prototype of the lending screen with a mocked return-history badge, tested with a few neighbours who own tools.
- 1Measure: the share of testers who agree to lend when the badge is shown, compared with a version without it.
Key terms
- Process Framework
- A shared strategy for a design workflow, giving a team a common philosophy, phases and methods.
- Lean UX
- An iterative approach that gets a testable product to users quickly, built around hypotheses and minimum viable products.
- Acceptance Criteria
- Conditions, expressed as visible interface elements, that a design must meet to satisfy a user story.
- Crazy 8s
- A sketching method in which each person draws eight ideas in eight minutes on a sheet folded into eight panels.
- Vertical Prototype
- A prototype that shows depth: the steps, states and overlays inside one specific task.
- Wizard of Oz Prototype
- A prototype in which a hidden person operates a feature that has not yet been built.
- Prototype Fidelity
- The level of detail a prototype shows, from simple wireframes to fully realised visuals and working software.
Design Methods and Prototyping FAQ
Why is the waterfall model a poor fit for user experience work?
Its phases run one after another, so problems found with users during testing arrive after design decisions are locked in. Iterative user-centred design loops back, keeping user needs realistic and reducing risk.
What is the difference between Agile UX and Lean UX?
In the seminar’s comparison, Agile UX is process-focused, running user stories through sprints, while Lean UX gets a testable product to users quickly, built around a hypothesis and a minimum viable product.
What are the six stages of the design sprint?
Understand, define, sketch, decide, prototype and validate. The methods chosen inside each stage, such as affinity clustering or dot voting, are what make the sprint flexible.
Why start with paper prototypes?
Paper is quick and cheap, needs no software skills and invites honest feedback because nobody is attached to a rough sketch, so ideas can be tested and discarded before effort is invested.
Assessment move
Draw the six sprint stages from memory and, under each, write two methods with a one-line purpose. Then take a simple product idea and walk it through the stages on one page, producing a How Might We note, a goal with its signal and metric, a quick Crazy 8s sheet and a decision between a rumble and an all-in-one.
For process frameworks, write one paragraph comparing Agile UX and Lean UX and check it against the seminar’s contrast. For prototyping, sketch the same three screens twice, once as a horizontal prototype and once as a vertical one, and note what each version can and cannot test.
Finish by writing five acceptance criteria for one of your own user stories, each naming a visible element, which is the exact format the Submission 2 kanban board expects.
Working through Design Methods and Prototyping in FIT5152? Sia is AskSia’s AI Information Technology tutor — ask any FIT5152 Design Methods and Prototyping question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how FIT5152 is taught and assessed. Read this chapter free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.
