This week there was outrage from users on Facebook who believed that their private messages had been published to their Facebook walls. A spokesperson from Facebook insisted that this was not the case and that users had simply mistaken the layout on their timelines and had believed that because of the format, these must have been private messages. This made me think of how many preconceptions we have when it comes to design and how much we can worry when these expectations haven’t been met. Many designers use prototyping software to experiment with their different design concepts before they implement this with coding. Prototyping software can be especially useful for those who cannot code.
There are some instances when users must simply get used to a new design of a website (for example with the Facebook timeline), and others when a design is completely unintuitive and is also not easy for repeated users to learn. One of the advantages for designers at Facebook is that they know their users are people who will return to their page and who spend long periods on their pages. This means that if they were to use prototyping software, they would have been interested in seeing how this affects the learnability of their site. For people who have websites that are designed to attract first-time users, however, prototyping software can be useful to experiment with different templates. With certain types of prototyping software, users can be shown the designs and then asked to click through the prototypes. Designers can then see if this should be changed.
