What Do Prototypes Prototype?¶
Houde, S., & Hill, C. (1997). What Do Prototypes Prototype?. Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Design Prototyping
- The explicit formulation of the question or hypothesis the prototype is designed to test
This sourceEstablishes the role / look-and-feel / implementation (+ integration) taxonomy: a single prototype cannot answer all questions, so fidelity/scope is chosen per question.
SupportedVerified against the work's full text
Houde and Hill shift the vocabulary of prototyping from attributes of the artifact to the questions a prototype is meant to answer, namely "What role will the artifact play in a user's life? How should it look and feel? How should it be implemented?", and state that being explicit about which design questions must be answered is an essential aid to deciding what kind of prototype to build. That explicit formulation of the question is what the sentence requires. The work speaks of design questions; the sentence's alternative of a hypothesis, and its checklist framing, extend that wording.
“Be clear about what design questions are being ex- plored with a given prototype”
- The explicit formulation of the question or hypothesis the prototype is designed to test
Mechanisms¶
- Clickable Prototype
- Its failure mode is that it is a Potemkin façade: a convincing front with nothing behind it, so it proves nothing about engineering, data integration, latency, error handling, or reliability.
This sourceExplains that a prototype may deliberately address role or look-and-feel questions without demonstrating how the system will be implemented.
- Its failure mode is that it is a Potemkin façade: a convincing front with nothing behind it, so it proves nothing about engineering, data integration, latency, error handling, or reliability.
- Scale Mockup and Tactile Review
- The team builds a series of looks-like/works-like mockups
This sourcePrototypes can separately or jointly explore an artifact's look and feel and how it works.
- The team builds a series of looks-like/works-like mockups
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 3 citations: 1 supported. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
See how references were verified.
Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.
Registry ID ref:ad28c83aee77 · see in the full table