I've heard about this issue from different people and written sources. When building prototypes one would like evaluation from users. One type of evaluation is, for each functionality, whether it is actually needed or appreciated and how it should be constructed.
What I hear is that if a complete, or rather complete, prototype is presented, the user will comment on irrelevant things, and not be able to give useful feedback on the functionalities. Not even when instructed to do focus on specific aspects. For instance the user will comment on the graphical aesthetics, maybe even comment on colours and font face.
So what I hear being recommended is that in some way I should present prototypes that focus solely on the aspects I want to evaluate. If there are five functionalities that I need tested, I could make five groups of prototypes. The first group could focus on a the presentation of historical data, fx a plot with some buttons for zooming and sliding. I could then make three different versions of this.
I then see two basic ways of making the user focus on this functionality, when evaluating it.
- Graying out every other aspect of the GUI.
- Simply not showing the rest of the GUI. But there must be other ways as well.
What is the best way to achieve this?