UX Australia 2011

Mockupitis

Pronunciation: \ˈmäk-ˌəp-ˈī-təs\

Function: noun

Date: 2006

1: The tendency of a UI mockup to make assumptions about design constraints based on poorly-chosen sample data used in the static wireframe, photoshop comp, or interactive prototype. Short labels that fit neatly into the space provided for them, evenly-dispersed text, small numbers of columns, orderly and strangely regular tabular data, convenient numbers of items in lists that happen to fit just precisely into the page, the list goes on. This tends to reduce the design to a limited visual exercise instead of exercising its ability to handle more realistic formations of user data.

This talk is for anyone who designs interactive products that display content, especially user-generated, structured content, and will focus especially on web-based applications. It’s meant to last about 35 minutes, with 3 main focus areas:

1. Definition and Examples: an introduction to mockupitis, and a set of sample mockups that exhibit various design problems because of the data chosen by the designer.
2. Strategies: the middle and longest section of the talk breaks down mockupitis into its component errors and assumptions.
3. The last part is about Tools: we’ll share evaluations of the mockup tools currently on offer with particular interest in how they support variation of sample data.

I’ll show some blunders made by myself and my teams, and in the Q&A period I’d like the audience to share some war stories as well.

Audio

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Download: Avoid mockupitis (mp3 audio file)