Mobile Prototyping: Crafting Digital Experiences

Workshop

Mobile Prototyping: Crafting Digital Experiences focuses on learning adaptations to online spaces via mobile platforms and devices. User Experience (UX) design, focusing on usability and accessibility models will be covered, as well as interactive prototyping via User Interface (UI) design systems. Students in this field are learning the many ways that interactive media overlaps and intersects with diverse digital user-based products. In focusing on exploration of transitioning technologies into hybrid spaces, participants will examine current mobile UX models, as well as how to create interactive prototypes for inclusion into digital-based education.

Timetable

Introductions and learning of basic UX foundations and models (10 min).
Accessing design system 'kits' to be used within the frameworks for InVision software. Participants will then learn the basics of this software for interactive prototyping building (10 min).
Participants will build a working, digital prototype with software via sponsored design kits for gestural and action-based interactions (10 min).
Participants will break into small groups to share the results with other participants via live links to test on various, individual mobile devices (10 min).
Final thoughts, additional Q&A (5 min).

Interaction

The workshop will foster a participatory learning environment in which prebuilt materials and digital 'kits' will be provided for download. This will allow participants to focus more on building the interactive UX components while learning the basics of InVision software. The demo will be an engaging experience in creating digital prototypes in a rapid mindset, inclusive of time blocks and agile making and sharing.

Takeaway

Participants will learn new interactive methods that focus primarily on UX modeling within a mobile framework, as well as learning the basics of InVision prototyping software. Participants will be able to transition this into the digital, participatory learning environments in their respective design curriculum.

Outcomes

The results and outcomes of this workshop experience will further inform my pedagogical practices in shaping contemporary UX/UI curriculum efforts. Interactive prototype products from the experience will be archived and shared via a live landing page hosted on my personal site after the session.

Abstract

The mobile landscape continues to rival desktop experiences — in fact nearly 52% (February 2018) of online experiences reside in the mobile space versus tablet or desktop (Statcounter, n.d.). Furthermore, the manner in which students interact and utilize this technology has become an extension of themselves, and as makers, reflective of their personal pursuits in digital design work. Students live in a unique space of being a user and a designer. Exploration and emphasis of this workshop will focus on these underpinnings of adapting to this unique space of 'user as designer' as well as discussion of usability and technological understandings of how to prototype digital experiences within mobile frameworks. User Experience (UX) design will focus on user-centered design models in order to create functional, rapid digital prototypes.

With respect to the complexities of designing an app, the focus will reside on UX foundations in establishing a sequence of interactions. These interactions, much like a highly traveled interstate, will become the main route users would take in utilizing the app. The interactive prototype products will be created, tested and shared in the session experience, with the intent to foster strategies for digital participatory learning.

References

Statcounter. (n.d.). Desktop vs mobile vs tablet market share worldwide-February 2018. Retrieved from http://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet