Paper Prototyping

For the first week of our course we had to create paper prototypes. We had done something similar in the past in Bespoke Design, but this time we were prototyping a fitness app that would be available both for a smartphone and a smartwatch.

Smartwatch

I chose to go for simple functionalities for the smartwatch, such as tracking and displaying the current data (travelled distance, burned calories, current speed) with appropriate icons, while also adding the possibility to view the current and previous day’s data. I decided to limit the amount of days you can see on the smartwatch because it is almost always used in combination with the phone, which has a bigger screen that can display more information.

smartwatch prototype

For the smartwatch prototypes I decided to focus on gestures rather than tap areas due to the small touching surface, and highlighted this by greying out the borders that would represent a swipe that could be performed.

Smartphone

The same functionalities would be available for the smartphone, but when it came to history, it offered a much wider range, allowing the user to select a day, week, month and even a custom period (which I considered to be essential) for which they want to see the recorded information. I made this possible by cutting two tiny squares with hollow centres that could be moved around the ”screen” to select the said dates. As I thought would be a must, the Settings/Account page is also present on this part of the prototype.

smartphone prototype

Evaluation and reflection

Testing the smartphone prototype with the first two people offered good feedback on how the users will use the app, which surprisingly is exactly as intended, and was very well understood. Unfortunately, they haven’t provided any suggestions for improvement, so I decided to go ahead and find a 3rd person to test it with. Finally, I have received feedback on the tracking screen, which, as they said, should also include a tracker to see the progress towards the goal, which was added after the iteration.

before

after

The smartwatch prototype was created at a later date, and was tested again, with 3 people, different than the ones from the smartphone test. The tests went as expected, with only one of the 3 users tapping on the grey areas instead of swiping from them, but despite that, they could not offer a suggestion on how I could make the swiping action clearer.

The assignment was easy to fulfil and provided insight on how fast you can actually prototype your ideas with minimal efforts and resources, while also showing at which part of the project it would be ideal to use lo-fi prototypes. The only struggle I found during the project was coming up with an idea on how the users could select custom dates for the smartphone version of the app.