September 22 - Paper Prototyping

Paper prototyping is a simple and cost effective way to test human-computer interfaces. The design would be put on pieces of paper that could easily be arranged and rearranged as needed. Test users would be able to interact with a paper design, with the pieces being rearranged by a second person. Thus the test user can provide feedback and major changes can be made before a single line of code is written.

I think I have a pretty good grasp of how paper-prototyping works. It's straight-forward enough. I did want to see how it was done, exactly, so I found some stuff on youtube and that helped. Seeing it done definately gives you a better sense of how it can help in the design process.

I was surprised that Jakob Nielsen said that paper-prototyping isn't used very often. I suppose I could see some people thinking it would be a waste of time and just plunging right into the code. It just seems like paper prototyping could save so much time and frustration in the long run, that it would be worth it. Granted, I've never written a sinle line of code, but I can imagine that crumpling upa piece of paper and sketching out a new design would be a lot less frustrating than having to rewrite lines and lines of code.

In addition to the benefits one could gain from working with a test user, I would think that paper-prototyping would be a useful tool when working with clients. If you're designing a website or some other type of interface for someone who doesn't know anything about code, you could bring them a paper layout that they could arrange to their liking. In this way the client might feel that they had more of a hand in the design process and might then be happier with the end result.