Social Fashion Application Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Social Fashion Application - Coursework Example The essay "Social Fashion Application" concerns the design and fashion. This section covers prototyping and storyboarding as the participatory design techniques which provides an opportunity for the designers and users to work together during the development period. The benefits of such an approach include: a) Requirements are likely to be more accurate thus improving the system quality, b) Can help avoid certain costly application features which users might not be in need of, c) Helps improve the acceptance level of the product. A prototype refers to an application which is rapidly implemented and constitutes only a small section of the expected functionality of the full application. It is intended to help elicit for requirements by giving the involved team a chance to get early feedback relating to their ideas. Other than freezing system requirements before design or coding activities can continue, a throwaway prototype should be built to understand the requirements. The developmen t of the prototype will be based on the requirements known at present. Use of the developed prototype gives the clients an opportunity to actually â€Å"feel† the application. Prototyping would be ideal for a large application as this one because of the absence of an existing system to help in establishing the requirements. The prototype will not be a complete system and will not contain most of the details. It will just give a system which has overall functionality. Other than the active involvement of users during development .and providing an opportunity for the identification of difficult or confusing functions, exposure of end users to the built software prototype also provides an avenue for identification and correction of errors at an earlier stage thus avoiding rework at later dates. However, this approach has the risk of increasing an application’s complexity as the scope of the application can go beyond the initial plans The reason why the prototype model wou ld be appropriate for the Social Fashion Application is that the targeted users need to interact a lot with the desired application. The web interfaces in this application, requires a great level of interaction with the targeted users. Building an application which requires limited training and able to support ease of use among users would take a lot of time in case the development team ignores this model. Story Boards Storyboarding refers to a reiterative and interaction design method which employs a set of pictures or sketches in demonstrating the end to end solution towards a given task scenario. (CRM, 2006) Storyboarding is helpful in exploring potential experiences prior to investing in software development and as well as understanding the human context within which the application will be used. It can be useful in discovering the best design approach being that it is an earlier process thus reducing the development cost (What are Story Boards Good for?) The storyboards can be better alternatives compared to use cases, user stories or task scenarios because the preparation of any of the documents can always be frustrating then possibly end in a software product that is not satisfactory. Also, they can be used to complete the any of the business requirements documents mentioned above. Stories work effectively in the software world for being able to help the