[Recap] Protofarm 2009 by IxDA SF

Tuesday night marked the first annual Protofarm event by the SF chapter of IxDA, hosted by Adobe Systems. This was an “open mic night” of sorts, wherein local experience designers got a chance to show off their prototypes and talk about their methodology around testing and design iterations. A variety of tools and methods were discussed… including paper prototypes, barebones HTML mock ups, models carved from foam, Powerpoint animations, and much more. Since the event was sponsored by Adobe, we also got a sneak peek at Flash Catalyst, an app created explicitly for interaction design. You can browse my photos from the event here.

A few highlights:

The folks from Kicker showed us a foam prototype they made when testing a touch screen conference phone.

Anne Sullivan and Karen Kaushansky shared their paper prototype for mobile UI design for Microsoft’s TellMe.

Elizabeth Bacon (from Devise and VP of IxDA) discussed building an interactive prototype created for St. Jude Medical, made with images created in Fireworks stitched together with DHTML coding.

Riaz and his experimental electronic prototype, Mr Arduino Head.

The folks at Marketo used Powerpoint animations to communicate interactivity.

Aaron Harmon discusses “person prototypes”… a method he used when working on an in-car GPS system, a conversational interface. While out for a test driver with a user, the facilitator simply acts as the GPS, while the observer records observations.

The Flash Catalyst demo… start with a comp in Illustrator or Photoshop and drag it into Flash Catalyst. You can assign actions and animations to design elements quickly, and export as an SWF or AIR app for a more realistic testing experience.