You don’t design something like Facebook Home using Photoshop. […] It’s no secret that many of us on the Facebook Design team are avid users of QuartzComposer, a visual prototyping tool that lets you create hi-fidelity demos that look and feel like exactly what you want the end product to be. […] Not only does QC make working with engineers much easier, it’s also incredibly effective at telling the story of a design.
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The Journey Model … could be rendered, or modeled, in a number of different ways. It should also illuminate the most important dimensions—which could be the transition from phase to phase, or the switching between different channels.
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Scrum (one of the most popular variants of agile) advocates you create a Product Backlog, a collection of stories that describe user needs. …
The UXI Matrix is a simple, flexible, tool that extends the concept of the product backlog to include UX factors normally not tracked by agile teams.
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Occasionally, we will even turn to programs like Apple Keynote and Adobe After Effects to quickly demonstrate interactive transitions and animations. These lightweight models give us the ability to test and experiment with highly interactive designs without demanding the resources of a full engineering team. As the design process continues, these prototypes (and static design mocks) are crucial in our early “cafe” usability studies where we often walk a user through a single-outcome user “journey” (e.g. getting directions or finding a hotel).
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We have a saying at Facebook: Photoshop lies
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Felton says the main lesson he learned from the experience of designing and iterating Timeline is that “Photoshop lies.” “You can come into a meeting with a very beautiful comp and it’s like, ‘Oh yes, we should do it that way,’” he says. “But you’re never going to know if you can do it that way until you pump in the real data and live with it for days or weeks.
— Designers Behind Facebook Timeline: 5 Keys To Creating A UI With Soul
