This week the team worked on “build” — essentially building out the prototypes to our solution. Specifically, our team wrote three sample emails for the follow-up scheme we want to create for Arms Wide and potential content and interaction for the Facebook group. DFA emphasizes that the first steps of the build process should focus on concretely defining and creating content and building “lo-fidelity” prototypes. Essentially, lo-fidelity means as simple as possible, so without the frills and flourish of a final product.

There are a couple reasons to keep the early prototypes at lo-fidelity. The first is that it becomes easy to build something simple and test if it works rather than build an entire solution and realize something is wrong. This kind of happened with our team, as we received feedback from Arms Wide that the Facebook group would actually not be implementable for legal reasons. Keeping our prototype lo-fidelity means that we did not waste a lot of time or energy on a solution that was not actually feasible. Another reason to keep things lo-fidelity is to make sure that the content of the prototype is solid. For example, as we focus on the email scheme, we need to ensure the content of the emails is accurate and effective before moving onto design, color, and semantics, which would be characteristics we refine when we build our hi-fidelity prototype.

Next up for us is “test,” where we will test our prototypes and then iterate on our process to design and build better solutions. Hope this post helped understand “build” in the context of the Arms Wide project!