Back from Spain

I am back from a very short holiday from the south of Spain, Torremolinos. We stayed in hotel Cervantes, which was situated in the middle of the center. It was a nice hotel with even a swimming pool on the roof, the food in the restaurant was quite good. Although we almost had to eat french fries with every meal, which is even a bit too much for a Belgian guy.

We also interacted a lot with the local people. Our daughter was with us and they really loved her. I think it must be because she is a little lovely girl with blonde hair, as you can see in the picture below.



Although we didn't do much besides making very long walks along the beach and eat and drink a lot, it was enough to recharge my batteries. I feel I am fit enough now for the upcoming holidays and the partying that goes along with it.

During the holiday I also read this book about Paper prototyping written by Carolyn Snyder. It gave me some new insides in creating prototypes and usabilty testing. At work we use Flash to create our prototypes and it sometimes gives me the feeling that if you show these Flash prototypes to people, even my boss, that they think they are dealing with an actual product that is already finished. And its also hard to make changes to the interface because people get really attached to the things they do and make and it is really hard to make them change this. Another thing was usability testing, we discussed a lot in our team how the interface should look like and although we came to a concencus about things they seemed to be completely wrong when we showed them to users. It would have saved us a lot of coding time if we would have created a paper prototype and done some usability testing before the implementation at least that's what I am expecting now from paper prototyping. I will start paper prototyping on a project I am starting to work at so I will kep you informed about the way it goes.