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One of the most important elements of human-centered design
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is making sure that all the different design choices you make —
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what functionality is available and what interface elements, information architecture,
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and visual design [that] present that functionality
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harmoniously combine to fluidly support the activities that matter to people that are using your system.
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I bet that a lot of the systems that you find most inspiring benefit from this coherent, user-centered approach,
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and that a lot of the interfaces that you find frustrating lack this coherence and feel jumbled.
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Achieving this harmony can be difficult
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because it’s easy to get sucked into implementation details and miss the forest for the trees.
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One of the best ways of ensuring that a coherent, human-centered vision
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drives your design and your design team
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is to create a video prototype showing what you imagine it’ll be like to use your system.
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It’s also a lot of fun.
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To give you a sense of what I mean by this,
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I’d like to show you a video prototype that the walkabout team created at Stanford.
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(It’s time to go!
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With the click of a button, Carissa sets Walkabout in motion on her iPhone.
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She doesn’t have a lot of time for exercise in her day,
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but she likes to stay healthy by walking to and from her destinations.
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She’s got a couple of minutes before the bus comes,
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so she sits down to check her Walkabout progress.
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Walkabout counts the steps that she makes in her everyday life and converts them into a personal journey.
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Carissa is taking a personal journey up Mount Everest.
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She’s at 28,000 feet, about to reach the Hillary Step,
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and she decides to take a look around.
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Ryan’s feeling competitive.
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He pulls up Walkabout and challenges his friend Brendon to a walk-off:
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Whoever gets the most steps by the end of the day wins.
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Brendon decides he’s ready to accept the challenge.
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As he heads off to his next class, he has to decide whether or not he’s going to take the elevator.
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He checks his Walkabout competition and sees that Ryan is in the lead.
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Brendon heads up the stairs.
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Should Ryan take the long way to work, or the short way?
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With more at stake than there used to be, he sets off.
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Carissa checks her phone: She’s been invited to a step-off for Obama.
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She’s happy to track her steps for a good cause.
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Ryan’s also been invited to the step-off; he decides to join too.
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Everyone’s steps are accumulated cooperatively.
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Joining up is a no-brainer for Brendon.
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He decides to post a group Walkabout status on his Facebook page.
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Walkabout: Small steps can lead to big change and big fun!
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Walkabout / an iPhone application by: / Carissa Carter / Ryan Mason / Brendon Wypich)
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Video prototypes offer four really important benefits for your design process.
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First, they can be really cheap and fast to make.
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Second, they serve as great communication tools.
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Among other things, it’s a wonderful way of showing the context of use,
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so that your entire design team can get on that same page.
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And because it’s a standalone video, it’s an explanation of your design ideas that’s completely portable
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and that anybody, anytime can call up and look at.
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I also really like using video prototypes as a spec for a development team
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where you can say “any interface that accomplishes this goal is a good interface.”
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And these videos can make the interface design decisions come alive
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a lot more than a written long-word documentation.
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And finally, video prototypes force you to tie all of your interface design decisions to actual user tasks.
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This helps you align, orient, and prioritize your interface choices.
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And it makes sure you have a complete interface:
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Do you have all of the elements that somebody would need to accomplish the task that they’d like to?
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and also that there’s nothing extra?
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In the development process it’s really easy to find
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all sorts of bells and whistles and shiny things that you want to be able to add into the system.
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And if it ultimately doesn’t help people accomplish goals,
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a video prototype can be a great way to remind yourself that maybe it’s best to leave it out.
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You can use video prototyping throughout your design lifecycle.
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Really early on, when you’re first just starting to think around ideas,
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you can use video prototypes as a brainstorming aid, and these can take just a few minutes.
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You can take paper prototypes that you’ve built and, in an hour or two, put together a video really quickly.
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Or, if you have a design idea
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that you really need to get a lot of support behind from a large organization
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to sell something to management or investors,
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you can make a really slick video prototype as a way of selling and explaining your ideas.
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A great example of this is Apple’s Knowledge Navigator, which, 20 years ago,
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introduced a number of ideas for a vision of a future smarter, more adaptive user interface.
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And while it can be appealing to try and channel your inner Steven Spielberg and make a big-budget epic film,
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a lot of my favorite uses of video prototypes comes early in the design process,
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where you’re using video as a way of communicating to the design team and debating design ideas.
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And in a lot of cases, you’ll use your paper prototypes
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as the interface that the video prototype is elaborating on.
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Here’s a great example of that that Lisa Seaman made
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when she was working on a smart energy-monitoring system at Stanford.
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(Abby Dinkenspiel is an economics professor at Stanford.
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She cares about her energy usage, but it’s not to the extent of her actions.
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She receives a monthly energy bill,
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but there’s little information about which activities or devices consume the most energy.
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She wants to be able to identify problem spots and correct them as best as possible.
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Using her home monitoring system, Abby’s able to see how much electricity each of her appliances is using.
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Starting in the kitchen, she’s able to compare the usage of each of her appliances to the national average.
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She’s also able to look at the other rooms of the house, check her progress statistics,
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and talk to her energy-saving buddy.
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Through the console, she is able to look at other rooms in her house.
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The house schematic shows where each of her appliances is located.
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She is also able to individually target rooms like the library, bathroom, bedroom and living room
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to see how much energy she is using in each.
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She’s able to select one — such as the bathroom — and control the devices.
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Here she can set the shower time, so that the hot water will gradually turn off after ten minutes.
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Abby is also able to check her home monitoring system remotely while she is in the office.
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She can go to a personal website and access device info,
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check her progress, and chat with her energy saving buddy.
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She’s also able to control her devices via a smartphone
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in case she happens to leave the lights on or the air conditioning.
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With access to neighborhood consumption patterns,
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consumers can accurately compare their energy consumption to their neighbors.
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Neighborhoods can band together in the fight to reduce their collective carbon footprint.
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Another energy-saving tool is the buddy system,
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where you enlist a friend, colleague, or online friend to save energy together.
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This is a good way to check progress and motivate each other in a positive yet competitive way.
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Stanford University / Initiative for a Sustainable Future)
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So what do you put in a video prototype?
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Like a storyboard, you’ll want to make sure that the video prototype shows the entire task,
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including the upfront motivation, and the success outcome at the end.
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Establishing shots and narrative at the beginning can really help with this.
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For example, in the Walkabout video, Carissa begins by saying, “it’s time to go.”
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That introduces the task: She needs to head somewhere, and Walkabout is reminding her to walk.
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Video prototypes are also a great time for you to take what you learned in the field and put it to use.
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Draw on the tasks that you observed and elaborate on them when making your prototype.
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When you think about the task that you want your system to perform especially well,
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those are things that you should showcase in the video prototype.
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And in this way a video prototype is a great way
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of figuring out what your minimal viable product is for something you’ll want to release —
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In the video, in the minimum viable product;
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Not in the video, doesn’t need to be in the first round.
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As you can see in making these prototypes, you’re making important and consequential design decisions.
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And in this way — making and viewing these prototypes —
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changes what the design teams argue about and I think do so in a really good way.
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Alright, you’re on board and ready to go.
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How do you do it?
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Well the first thing to do, like anything, start with an outline.
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Plan out your shots, what the video prototype is going to show and how the tasks will accomplish that.
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You can use the storyboards that you’d made to help you do that; those will be really valuable here.
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It’s also fine to extemporize.
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Turn on the camera. Make up a bunch of stuff. See what happens.
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Don’t worry about a fancy camera: It doesn’t matter; It’s not that important.
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And in fact, fancy gadgets can often be a distraction here,
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because it’s easy to spend a lot of time on the production side of things.
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If you, or anyone you know, has a a camera phone,
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you’ve got the equipment that you need probably to make a video prototype.
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The other main ingredients you’ll need of course are people:
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Get your friends to be actors or you can be actors yourself.
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Great way to build to build empathy with the people that’ll use your system.
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And you’ll need a real location.
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Its fun to shoot these out in the world, or wherever you think people will be using your system.
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And I can’t emphasize enough how the goal of a video prototype
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is really about the message and story that you’re trying to get across, and not about high production values,
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because it really is easy to spend far too long on that.
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When planning your prototype, think about a couple of things:
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One of the most important ones is:
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Are you going to make it with audio, or make it silent movie style?
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A big advantage of having it be silent movie style, is that audio can just be a pain to deal with.
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You can make title cards on sheets of paper at home, so, you can use these to title the scenes.
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And you can also use things like Post-It notes to communicate stuff about your users —
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so, give people a name tag that has their name, or role,
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or something that the audience ought to know about what they care about.
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As we talked about, the interface can be anything you want —
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You can make a paper prototype, or digital mockups; or, if you have code, go with that;
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or the interface can even be invisible.
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So for example, if I was going to build a presentation tool interface,
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you could show me working at this tablet right here, without actually showing any of what I see on the screen,
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and I really like that as a strategy
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because it absolutely emphasizes what the person using the system can accomplish.
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And then later, you can think about “What UI would we need to enable them to do that?”
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And finally, if I can give you one tip
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that will make this a whole lot more fun and save you a whole lot more time:
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Edit as little as possible because editing is hugely time-consuming.
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My TA for this class, Robbie, knows that far too well.
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If you can, do the whole thing in one take, and if that’s not reasonable,
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just use the pause button in your camera to be able to do your in-camera editing,
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and you’re off and running.
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For more information, see Wendy Mackay’s material.
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She’s done a lot of work on video prototyping over the years and has a lot of great suggestions.
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I’d also like to thank her because a lot of the stuff that I shared with you today
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is based on her teaching of this stuff over the years.
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Have fun!