Mockups, Prototypes and Demos... Selling the Dream!

Recently i found a video on Aza Raskins blog (creative lead at Mozilla) called How to Prototype and Influence People. It's worth watching!.. working within large companies can quite often be overwhelming, especially where there are ideas, requests, suggestions being carpet bombed about the place! This doesn't mean they are bad ideas though, but inevitably they will be submerged in a saturated plethora of emails that never get read in your inbox!

Thats where prototyping really comes into its own in my opinion, theres nothing more engaging than saying "Try this!".

If you really want to push an idea, Prototyping web apps and selling them visually can do so much more than any email ever could. Generally talk is cheap, ideas are valueless, and suggestions disposable amongst a busy office environment. As a developer, prototyping is definately something i plan to do more of in future.

You can't multitask!

"True multitasking just isn't possible. Im sure a certain amount of people reading this will disagree. But i promise you its not possible for me, and its not possible for you!"

At first, this claim can sound fantastic. We can exercise and listen to music at the same time. We can also compose a literal sentance whilst typing it out to a computer keyboard at the same time, and sometimes also whilst playing music in the background.

In these cases however, our brains have habituated itself slowly over time towards these tasks. Would you still be able to concentrate on thinking, typing (and listening to music) if you had just switched to a Dvorak keyboard?

Time for an experiment. Time yourself doing the following two actions:

1) Spell aloud, letter by letter, "Caffeinated cola is good" at the same time as you write your full name.

2) Spell aloud, letter by letter, "Caffeinated cola is good" and then, after you are done with that, write your name

The first action took me almost 26 seconds to complete. In the second action however, i managed to complete the task in 14 seconds flat. The net effect of this is that it takes almost twice as long to think about 2 tasks simultaneously than it does to complete them sequentially. My best guess as to why this happens is due to the lead time with which it takes the brain to switch tasks.

So we can multitask, it just takes longer? Well not really...

Try this task for yourself, you will feel yourself manually switching your train of thought every couple of seconds, which isn't true concurrency! The only way around this, would be to practice over and over again until your natural brain has adjusted to them so much that your memory and experience reduces the lead time involved whilst task switching.