Summary
The researchers of this paper examine the benefits of parallel prototype versus serial prototyping. They hired participants that were tasked to create an ad-banner. The results of the banner were place online where online behavior of users was used to assess the quality of the participants’ creation. Additionally the banners were evaluated by experts on a 1-10 scale. The participants discovered that the parallel approach enable the participants to create better quality ads. The parallel approach beat every metric used by the researchers to measure the efficacy of serial and parallel approaches.
Reflection
I found this research to be quite interesting. The parallel approach is a novel method to increase creating for users. Instead of having the user iterate over a single design, the users are instead tasked to create multiple designs. They are then asked to iterate over these designs. Since they have multiple different designs being developed in parallel, they have more flexibility to experiment. For instance, one design could be a bit more conservative while the other design could be much more outlandish; the user is able to experiment the two different approaches and determine which approach works better. There are a few drawbacks of using parallel prototype. The most obvious drawback is that parallel prototyping requires more time and resources since the user is working on multiple designs at the same time. As a result, this approach cannot be used in a situation where time and resources are scarce.
The results of this research encourage users to abandon the typical method of serial prototyping and instead attempt parallel prototyping. The results of the expert review portion of the research were pretty definitive. I believe it is not difficult to understand why parallel prototyping would be more effective; users are given more avenues to explore options and if one fails, they do not have to start all over again. It also offers them the opportunity to think outside-the-box thus fostering their creativity.
The measurement of creativity in this paper was partly measured by visitor behavior on a client site. It is difficult to determine why the user behaves a certain way. The user may have spent more time on the client site simply because they are are slow readers. On the other hand, having experts rate the ads was probably a more accurate test of measurement.
The research explored whether parallel ideas are more likely to bear more fruitful results. This is somewhat similar to my own research where I’m exploring if taking notes in parallel allows students to take better notes. My approach adds a few more constraints on the users such as having to follow a guideline provided by the instructor but overall, we are measuring if a certain methodology produces better results; just like this research.