THE APPLICATION OF RAPID PROTOTYPING IN WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT IN THAILAND: A CASE STUDY FOCUSED ON A MID-SIZE. Rapid Prototyping (RP) is often used in product innovation and product design because users need to test the product before it goes to the production line (Kelley, 2002).
An Overview of Website Development
At this stage, the designer should ask as many questions as possible so that the designer can understand what the customers want for the website. At this stage, we must develop a site map, and the designer must indicate which technologies should be implemented. At this stage, the designer will use the available information to develop a mockup from paper or using Photoshop depending on which method is most appropriate and show the team to discuss the look and feel of the website.
This allows developers to quickly create a visual prototype for users to see how the website will look and make any changes. Then the coding team will work on the website, making the website more dynamic using different languages like php, VB.Net. At this point, the programmer will demonstrate what he did to the tester, and the tester will find a bug or some issues that make the website not work smoothly.
One way to get visitors to visit your website frequently is to offer new content, always have fresh content on your website or redesign your website every year, following the current trends.
Rapid Prototyping in Website Development
If the tester finds any errors, it will be returned to the programmer to be fixed and then delivered to the tester to be tested again. Once there are no errors, this website can be delivered to the client and published. Similar to Tomáš Hujer (2011), he referred to the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), a traditional application development method.
He also provides a rapid application development (RAD) adapted from SDLC as shown in Figure 2.5, so that the system can develop faster and some of the functionalities can be available to the user as soon as possible. On the other hand, one disadvantage is non-standard procedures of this kind of development, such as lack of documentation, improper use of development. The process is 1) contact with stakeholders in the website to gather requirements from stakeholders or end users through interview, 2) rapid prototyping on paper to look at the content that will be used on the website to make the links between content search.
In this phase you must select some of the key stakeholders to evaluate the structure of the website, 3) rapid prototyping on computer to assess design issues, key stakeholders are also involved in this phase and they must give feedback on what they see, so the development team will re-design the prototype based on the feedback they get, 4) build the website, after getting the final prototype, move on to the next stage to create a website by using the programming language to build it and test the website, and 5) website maintenance.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
- The In-depth Interview
- Background of Interview Company
- The Study Population and Sample
- Data Collection
- Data Analysis
Plan: Identify the interviewees who will be the participants, data sources – information about the interviewees who have the most relevant knowledge for the interview and contrast. Developing instrument: interview protocol, such as what to say to the interviewees to start the interview, what to do during the interview, interview guideline questions, they should be open-ended questions and a semi-structured format (Pereira, Pedrosa, Simon, and Matovelle) . Sanook Online Company Limited was founded in 1998; the performance that Sanook! receiving the Truehits award every year is "the most visited website in Thailand".
There are several departments within the company, such as the IT department headed by Mr. Cherdsak Chokeruamchai, User Interface and Design Department headed by Mr. Aongart Temboonkait and Mrs. Piyanate Khaoto as leader. Topspace provides online solutions to customers, within Topspace there is a sales team and a creative team led by Mr. Tanapat Mongkolrerks, and also the senior HTML CSS development team led by Mr. Withun Saegue. In order to explore the research questions, I conducted six in-depth interviews with a cross-functional and cross-hierarchical sample: the population selected as interviewees are members of the IT department, the UI and design department, .. and Topspace, in the management level and staff level.
During the interview, participants were informed that the interview would be recorded and used for educational purposes.
DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS
Work Process of Website Development in Sanook!
They will then move to the production stage where the designer will create a 1-2 page jpg/png mockup to see the mood and tone of the website and wait for feedback from the client if the client has a problem small, the team will process it and send it back to the client and wait for approval. At this stage, the team allows the client only two revisions, otherwise the client may request too many changes and the team cannot proceed to the next stage. After that, the HTML/CSS designer will make the jpg/png file more interactive by creating an HTML, CSS and JavaScript file and then hand it over to the programmer to code the website in the next step.
After the developer completes the website, they move on to the testing phase to find any bugs. Once, the customer has no further feedback or comments, then they move to the post-production stage. For the first, get request from BU, project owner will give the request to the team (designer, IT), then the team will follow the requests.
While in the meeting room the designer will make a quick prototype to illustrate what he understands from the requirement and discuss with the project owner whether they are on the same page or not, if not the designer will refine the prototype and show it to the project owner, repeat this process until they run out of time.
The Knowledge about Rapid Prototyping
Nevertheless, research should be conducted forever, as the trend of user engagement is always changing. This work process is similar to the IDEO example (Brown, 2008) already mentioned above, but the difference is that the people involved in the feedback process are not only the project owners, but also the users who will be our future users, which is more efficient than the project owner himself. Also, the iteration that will be used is not limited because the research is ongoing.
According to Reis (2009), the methods of doing rapid prototyping are 1) sketch the idea, 2) build a simple model, 3) act out a role play and 4) build a test website, among others. Sketch the idea, this happens when designer has a meeting with the project owner and sketches their idea on the paper, or when designer creates a mockup for the client to see the mood and tone. They have a practical knowledge about rapid prototyping through the work process in the company, they just lack the theoretical knowledge caused by the limitation of the company in knowledge sharing.
The Adoption of Rapid Prototyping for Website Development in sanook!
Related to this finding, Hujer (2011) pointed out that the advantage of conducting rapid prototyping increases the development speed, suits the user's need, but some interviewees said that using this approach increases the cost of the design phase, which is in contrast to the research. van Hujer (2011), mentioned that it can reduce development costs. Based on the findings, one of the interviewees also spoke about the complexity or size of the project. If the level of complexity or the size of the project is high, it may not be right to apply the rapid prototyping method because it will take too much time in the design phase, but if we create only a few pages it can applicable to apply this method. method.
Based on findings, we can conclude that the work process in sanook! is a kind of rapid prototyping approach, but it is not fully accepted. All interviewees agreed that applying this method can be useful in communication between designers and other stakeholders, including programmers and testers. So they can see the result at the beginning, and the requirement will not change during the development time.
DISCUSSION
Giving the comment in the UAT phase is not good because the team has to fix the product that is already finished and will affect the timing of the next project. Another issue that can be the factor in adopting or not adopting rapid prototyping approach is the level of perfectionism, meaning that if the stakeholders are picky, they will spend a lot of time commenting on the design and the team's need to refine the design several times iterations up to 20 iterations and the client can choose the design of the first iteration, it wastes development time. The size of the project may be the factor that stops the team from using rapid prototyping method, because if the size of the project is very large and very complex, it may take a lot of time to prototype all pages.
Furthermore, this study focuses on only one medium-sized company, which cannot be confirmed for all website development companies in Thailand. The findings would provide a more accurate picture of the application of rapid prototyping in website development in Thailand. Moreover, the customer always changes the requirements at the end of the development time, and sanook.
Moreover, in the requirement gathering phase, it will be better if the designer, and customers involved in the project also attend the meeting, so that designer can make rapid prototype and help all stakeholders to share their understanding and give immediate feedback on the wrong issues.
