Iterative Design (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia’s article on iterative design: “a design methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a product or process.” Covers its engineering history, the core prototype-test-refine cycle, its application to human-computer interfaces, the Marshmallow Challenge as a worked demonstration, and the case for iteration sometimes requiring a fundamentally different design rather than a refinement of the current one.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- See Iterative Design: the general cyclic methodology predates its 1988 usability-engineering formalization (the plan-do-check-act cycle in the 1960s; Barry Boehm’s spiral development model; the term entering computer-science literature by 1990); the Marshmallow Challenge (Peter Skillman, popularized by Tom Wujec) is a concrete demonstration of iteration’s value; and user testing can demand a fundamentally different design, not just a refined one, so flexibility needs to extend through a system’s whole architecture.