To those of you looking for Top of the Pops who have come to this blog-post accidentally I say "fret not wandering searcher", for you have stumbled upon a treasure far more substantial than the much-mourned TOTP. You have stumbled upon Cogapp's TTOP: Tech Tuesday Outreach Program.

Firstly, let's a get a bit of background out of the way. Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp central. The Technical Department gather round Japanese food in our conference room and discuss all manner of tech related trivia, from iPhones to ICONS and anything else they're musing about. This has tended to be the realm of the digital gurus, technological masterminds and computational wizards in the past, but this week Tristan decided to mix things up by opening the invitation to the entire office (and holding Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday, but that's less dramatic). Not only this, but having recently been to Brighton's Over the Air event, he had been inspired by the presentation given by Tom Hume [http://www.tomhume.org/] (MD of Future Platforms [http://www.futureplatforms.com/ ]) and Joh Hunt [http://bluejoh.com/] (a postgraduate research at the University of Sussex) called "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain". So with material generously lent to us from Tom and Joh and an invitation to the hallowed halls of Tech Tuesday extended to everyone, we descended upon the gathering. With almost all of the Cogapp team involved, Tristan had a much larger audience to demonstrate his digital delights to; the Tech Tuesday Outreach Program had begun.

Tristan started with background information and a brief about what we were going to be doing before swiftly moving onto the main event of the TTOP. "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain" is a group exercise designed to get people of different backgrounds working together on one project at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach creates a hotbed of creativity and ingenuity as ideas are proposed and almost instantly analysed by experts in various fields. With specialists from design, tech, production, user experience, finance and business development all bouncing ideas off each other, the inventive juices really got flowing.

But enough of the build up, "What was it you were actually doing?" I hear you cry. The exercise splits the group into several teams (in our case, 4 teams of about 5 people) and introduces us to the fictional Jeremy, a 34 married civil engineer with 2 young children. He is a novice in the world of mobiles - using his allocated texts, minutes and data allowance sparingly - but considers himself technically aware. He is dyslexic and enjoys nothing more than exploring his local peak as part of a spot of mountaineering. Each team was asked to design a mobile application for Jeremy that would allow him to interact with his workmates and family whilst on a mountain, and given a swanky dummy mobile on which to design it.

The teams all went to different corners of the office and got prototyping. Whilst I can't speak for the creative methodology behind the other groups, we had a discussion and created a Journey On- inspired mountain route planning and sharing application that we dubbed Journey Up. After hours (or minutes) of intensive (or lighthearted) prototyping, we had our idea, and we welcomed Mr. Joe Baskerville from a competing team for a bit of vigorous (or easygoing) user testing. This part of the exercise really highlighted the necessity of even the smallest amount of user testing, as clearly apparent but previously unidentified kinks in our product were brought to light by Joe's scrutinizing eyes.

After a reconvening session where teams displayed their designs so far, the proverbial spanner wasn't so much thrown into the works as it was hurled in with wild abandon as Tristan instructed us to swap the mobiles on which we were developing our apps. In all cases this completely changed the capability of the technology with which we had been working. All the teams had to adapt their development to accommodate the new technology and whilst some (a campfire emulator was adapted to incorporate a music purchasing program by one team) were more successful than others (Journey Up took a big hit when GPS was removed from our phone's spec), it showed how important it is to keep the wider audience in mind at all stages of development.

After a quick discussion of the lessons we'd all learned and a riotous round of applause, TTOP ended. Hats off to Tristan for a brilliant and welcoming Tech Tuesday, and indeed to Tom Hume and Joh Hunt for creating an imaginative and thought provoking exercise (read about their successful running of the event here [http://www.tomhume.org/2009/09/mobile-mountains-over-the-air-2009.html] and here [http://www.tomhume.org/2009/08/agile-2009-many-paths-to-the-top-of-the-mobile-mountain.html]).

To those of you looking for Top of the Pops who have come to this blog-post accidentally I say "fret not wandering searcher", for you have stumbled upon a treasure far more substantial than the much-mourned TOTP. You have stumbled upon Cogapp's TTOP: Tech Tuesday Outreach Program. Firstly, let's get a bit of background out of the way. Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp central. The Technical Department gather round Japanese food in our conference room and discuss all manner of tech related trivia, from iPhones to ICONS and anything else they're musing about. This has tended to be the realm of digital gurus, technological masterminds and computational wizards in the past, but this week Tristan decided to mix things up by opening the invitation to the entire office (and holding Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday, but that's less dramatic). Not only this, but having recently been to London's Over the Air event, he had been inspired by the presentation given by Tom Hume (MD of Future Platforms) and Joh Hunt (a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sussex) called "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain". So with material generously lent to us from Tom and Joh, and an invitation to the hallowed halls of Tech Tuesday extended to everyone, we descended upon the gathering. With almost all of the Cogapp team involved, Tristan had a much larger audience to demonstrate his digital delights to; the Tech Tuesday Outreach Program had begun. Tristan started with background information and a brief about what we were going to be doing before swiftly moving onto the main event of the TTOP. "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain" is a group exercise designed to get people with different skills working together on one project at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach creates a hotbed of creativity and ingenuity as ideas are proposed and almost instantly analysed by experts in various fields. With specialists from design, tech, production, user experience, finance and business development all bouncing ideas off each other, the inventive juices really got flowing.

What is a prototype?

A prototype is a rough mock-up of your current approach to your project (be it for a website, an interactive, or something else). It doesn’t have to be full of content. In fact, we often test with a mixture of guide content and lorem ipsum placeholder text, and it's not unheard of to have a totally black and white prototype with boxes instead of images.

Why make a prototype?

Prototyping has some big advantages. It helps us plan how the screens will work functionally, as well as graphically. By testing a protoype with users, we can quickly identify where we're going right and where we're going wrong, whilst there is still time to make changes. Wherever possible we test version one with users, make changes and then test version two. Often this rapid approach will be done between a morning and afternoon session, allowing us to take great strides in a single day's work.