Project

My interest in responsive design began early on in my internship when Jason Cave lent me Responsive Web Design, by Ethan Marcotte. I've been hooked ever since, attending weekly responsive design meetings, and working on several responsive based projects.

The responsive shoveler was my first responsive design project. The goal was to create an adaptive shoveler widget that can be displayed on any device and provide the customer with a full spectrum of available information.

Process

I hosted an Open Studio session to generate some quick ideas and brainstorm with others. The session was organized into individual sketching, a group discussion, and more sketching based on one or two concepts.

After the Open Studio, Andrew Otwell suggested that I create paper prototypes to flesh out some ideas that came from the Open Studio. And although we had a pretty good idea of which concepts were most promising, Andrew encouraged me to use this fast and simple method of prototyping to try out the less likely candidates.

So, I created several mockups out of paper and cardboard for various sizes of devices, photographed them, and created some short stop motion videos to demonstrate the intended action of the widget.

Outcome

Creating these prototypes and stop motion videos was a lot of fun, and were an effective way of exploring a concepts that wouldn't be practical to spend time developing otherwise. For complex user interfaces, paper prototyping could be very beneficial.

Documentation of each prototype can be found on the design server.