Brett Collinson

Here’s a great post about the process a Microsoft user experience designer went through to come up with the Excel chart styling interface for Office 2007.

It tracks through these logical and sensible steps:

• Understand the problem – what’s broken with chart styling in Excel at the moment (hint: they all come out looking boring)
• Paper prototype – explore ideas quickly on paper – it’s cheap
• Wireframe mock-ups in low-fidelity tool (eg. PowerPoint) – start to solidify the design and start testing it with users
• Interactive prototype – what’s it really like to use?
• Hi-fidelity mockup – how does the whole thing work together?

Not every design would need to go through each of these steps, but the overall process is important. And it’s also efficient. I think we really need to move from a business cultural where every early idea needs a hi-fidelity mock-up and that’s the only way business stakeholders can understand the design. It’s too costly. We spend more time polishing one earlier idea when we could be quickly exploring lots and lots, and then refining to one or two polished ones.