On the Effect of Visual Refinement Upon User Feedback in the Context of Video Prototyping

摘要

There has been extensive discussion and research surrounding fidelity or refinement of prototypes in paper and software form, especially focusing on how the nature of prototypes influences the feedback that this prototype can help elicit during user testing. We extend this debate to the domain of video prototypes, where use scenarios are acted out on video. This study examines how the visual refinement (a.k.a. visual fidelity) of design representations presented in such videos impacts user feedback. An experiment was performed where two video prototypes were compared, one where the product is portrayed with high visual refinement and the other looking rough and sketchy. Our results could not identify any significant effects upon the number or type of comments returned by users. This finding contrasts widely held contentions relating to fidelity of software and paper prototypes, though it agrees with similar experiments done with non video prototypes. In practice our results support the validity of testing with low fidelity videos and suggest that the choice of visual fidelity in video prototypes should be based on pragmatic project concerns, e.g., whether the video should be used also for communication and the resources that are available for prototyping.