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Summary
In this paper, the author discussed introducing parallel prototyping during group creative design process and show better results compared to serial design. In traditional theories, parallel design have several benefits including: promotes comparison, encourages exploration, foster design confidence. The user study includes several key criterias, For example, the result can be measured objectively and subjectively, which in practise is their online click rates and independent expert ratings. I think this part is particularly strong in terms of evaluating results. However, one part worthy discussion is that, the author mentioned participants need minimal artistic or engineering ability. I didn’t find where the author discuss the reason for this, but presumably to make sure participant’s background experience is consistent at the beginning. As for results section, parallel ads were rated more diverse than serial ads by MTurks. Also, parallel participant’s ad design self efficacy increased.
Reflection
First thing worthy discussion is participants has minimal prior knowledge in this field. From a broader sense, this makes harder for the results to generalize to more team working scenarios. In one of our reading reflections later this semester, there is one discussion of how user’s tenure diversity can improve group yield until a certain point on Wikipedia projects. Would it be possible that for professionals performing similar tasks, parallel prototyping may not yield conspicuously better results than serial prototyping? This is partly shown in the later discussion in the paper, in which statistics shown that experienced participants outperformed novices in almost all perspectives without surprise, but I also noticed that later one serial participant said that he received negative comments that helps improving the design but keeps reiterating. Also, the results show parallel participants gained more confidence in their design ability, as compared to serial designers received significantly more negative comments from clients. When combining these two points and the paper mentioned above, I think it is interesting to view this as a unified problem, which is how external feedbacks can discourage idea brainstormings, thus reflect as less ideas with lower qualities.