“Dow, S. P., Glassco, A., Kass, J., Schwarz, M., Schwartz, D. L., & Klemmer, S. R. (2010). Parallel prototyping leads to better design results, more divergence, and increased self-efficacy. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 17(4), 18.”
The paper proposes that parallel prototyping leads to better design results than serial prototyping. Dow et al touch upon how an iterative process is a known standard approach that benefits the design process. They discuss their hypotheses, namely “Parallel prototyping leads to feedback comparison and produces higher quality designs; Parallel prototyping results in more divergent concepts; Parallel prototyping leads to a greater increase in design task-specific self-efficacy.” Based on the crowdsoruced experiment, the authors find that the parallel prototyping is better at attracting more users, higher ratinfs and also boost diversity in content and satisfaction in their makers. Short studies towards the end of the paper are instrumental in the assesment of bias and credibility of the predertermined ad critique classes.
This study sparked an idea that I would probably think of adapting in my research. The scripted ad critique statements present an interesting aspect of annotation and labeling of data in general. And working on Misinformation and Fake News on YouTube Data, there aren’t well curated public datasets available. Thus the two follow up studies piqued my interest how the obvious questions arising from the experiment were adressed by the authors.
Speaking, of obvious questions, the authors should have specified if formalized or otherwise, about the time taken by the crowd workers to design the prototypes in the parallel or serial fashion. The parallel approach is definitely superior, but it would benefit to know the time spent by the participants on each prototype.
Such a parallel approach however, would not do well with respect to certain applications where there is a limitation on resources on designer availibility for longer periods or simply development of software,