In the last video, we talked about this behavioral layer and how we don't want to force users to unnecessarily think and figure out our interface, and the implication of that is we want to stick to well understood mappings. A good way to do this is to look for comparables end of test and prototype a lot early on in your design process. Now that's not something I suggest you do in this course, we just want you to get from idea to code in a thoughtful way but as you carry this stuff forward into your actual work, consider prototyping a lot, and I think that the skill of being able to create your own prototypes is really going to help you do this. Why is that important? Well, the obvious thing is as you go from early idea to something that's deployed with a lot of users, your flexibility plummets and your expense skyrockets. So this is sort of the obvious answer to, what's good about prototyping? So what you want to do is not reinvent the wheel, not force users to think. So if we look at, what does it mean to find comparables for the epic we've been playing with? Well, maybe we come up with these ideas about what sort of patterns might a user be expecting to see if they're searching for something, they know what they want and they have to find it and then they're going to see pricing and availability. Well, if your ideas are online shopping, maybe buying a used car might be a good sort of additional comp because online shopping, probably the set of things that we're going to be looking for is a lot broader than what we might be looking for on a used car site, it's all cars obviously, and then maybe photo search we might look at since we might be asking, how might we make this more visual because the user or the technician is often looking at the physical part? So the team comes up with a few comparables. Here's online shopping so they might just poke around and look at a few online shopping sites. This site, ui-patterns is also really good as you can zero in and look for specific patterns and kind of details. Here's how some of these looks with Amazon. We find something, we note that we can kind of modify our search over here and this is a detail page. You don't want to just blindly look at these comps and say, "Okay, that's what Amazon does. That's good." Because how they've arrived at that and how their overall service design works is not the same as what you're doing but what you don't want to do is invent a shopping experience or a buying experience or a finding thing experience that no one's ever thought of, that is a terrible idea. So let's look at this used car purchase thing. They might look at these sites, see some other things. This is a little bit different and we see this is very structured view of how we might modify and narrowing tune our search. Maybe that's relevant and they come up with two parallel prototypes. I am not suggesting you do this in your project, two is too much for this but here's one idea based on kind of the car sites and the commerce sites where they can either put in a part number or filter. Here's the detail Beijing. This is the detail page, and then maybe they look at a whole different approach concept to based on the photo site. So these are just some examples of how we might take or idea that what we want to stick to well understood mappings and bring that forward into stuff we can just sort of look at it to kind of base on our ideas and answer this question of what interface patterns might our user be expecting to see given the actions they're going to take in the user story? So that's something to think about as you go from idea to code.
