High Fidelity Prototype using the Unity 3D Game Engine

Video of the Hi-Fi prototype made in the Unity 3D engine.

Below is an interactive Unity3d Prototype. It requires the Unity3D web player plugin and will offer you to an install it if needed. The main difference between the movie above and the interactive prototype is that you are free to click the button for Skeppsholmen whenever you like. Then you may find the less frequent use cases that we decided to not model, following Pareto's principle to concentrate on the few details (popularized as "20% of the work") with most impact and ignoring the massive number of details that remains for perfection.


The only direct user interaction is the button that requests a trip via Skeppsholmen and updates the route and boat animation accordingly.

The following points from the think-alouds and peer/expert-feedback sessions has been implemented:

•  A separate "button" for adding a stop at Skeppsholmen's warf since the previous solution was too hard to recognize as a button.
• More distinct colour plotting the route.
• Distinct marking of the actual chosen route for the ferry.
• Direction for the ferry.
• Text changes to (via Skeppsholmen) at button press.
• Button press gives a distinct response, by update of button text, route on the map and destination text.

The work on this Hi-Fi prototype resulted in further findings by ourselves, and informal feedback collected from friends, peers and family during the process:

• Even a simple map animation gets complex when a route may be changed by user input at any stage in the animation.
• When is it too late to request a visit to Skeppsholmen?
• The alternate route is not visible. It should be visualized and explained properly.
• It is very hard to draw the line between prototyping and product design when using a tool that is powerful enough to work in a final design.

In retrospect, it maybe was a poor choice to use a production level tool like Unity for prototyping. We did indeed not find any better tool, but the ability of Unity to handle advanced improvement made every suggestion into a decision wether to improve or not. Spend time on improving presentation details or time on higher level holistic design while we still are in an early phase and can make drastic changes?