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of two people who chose to do things differently, and why:
From the Field: The Importance of Screen Real Estate
"My company develops applications for PDAs such as Pocket PC and RIM, and also for wireless
usage. I've found that sometimes it's important to have the look and feel of a specific
environment—in our case the developers have experience with other platforms but they're not
always familiar with how various widgets appear on the Palm vs. Pocket PC, etc. By creating
platform-specific widgets in a graphics application, it helped them understand exactly what they
needed to implement."
Phillip Hash, HiddenMind
"We used a paper-only interface back when we were still in the early stages of designing a
browser/phone combination. We wanted to understand what tasks worked well in this type of
interface, and to determine the appropriate set of buttons that would work for both navigation and
phone functions. It would have been premature to worry about screen size too much while we
were still in the exploratory phase."
Timo Jokela, formerly of Nokia
If you decide you need to worry about size constraints, one way to do it is in a graphics program: Start
with a photo or screen shot of the device, create a file for each individual screen, and then print them
out for testing. For example, here's how Phillip Hash created the prototype just described: "My
approach for handheld devices is to first grab screen shots of applications running on those devices,
such as my Pocket PC. Then I'll open those images in Fireworks and overlay widgets on top of them."
The paper prototype of the xpressa interface shown in Chapter 2 was created in a similar way. Hal
Shubin started by downloading a Palm Operating System Emulator (even though he wasn't prototyping
a Palm interface, it gave him something of about the right dimensions to work with). A graphic designer
created a mock-up of the entire telephone and gave him back a set of GIF files. Hal used PhotoShop to
create the paper prototype—the phone image was the background and he created overlays for each
different screen.
It's possible to avoid using a graphics package altogether but still keep screen constraints in mind. In
his topic Handheld Usability , Scott Weiss describes how to make a "blinder" for a small-screen device:
"The key component of a prototype of a handheld device is the blinder, which is a sheet of card with a
drawing of the hardware device with a cutout where the display would be. The size of the cutout is
important because it models the amount of data that can be displayed without requiring scrolling. In
order to support scrolling, the card must be larger than the drawing of the hardware device" ( Weiss,
2002 , p. 139) (see Figure 4.6 ). By using a grid (such as graph paper) for the display area, it's possible
to accurately represent the number of characters that are visible but still draw them by hand. (Or, if it's
faster, figure out an appropriate size font and type the data instead.)
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