Paper prototyping leads to perfection

• Writing by Rajveer
• On August 3rd, 2008 at 12:38 am

As a professional you are possibly involved in the design, implementation or support of a product that works as a software, website, or handheld device applications. As an individual you might be an interface designer, developer, usability specialist, information architect or a testing engineer. To develop a flawless product, for an individual it’s very essential to have the overall idea about the product and for a team to deliver a truly usable application.

Paper prototyping can be the easiest way to help each individual in the team. It is a method not only for designing, evaluating and improving user interfaces but also to resolve many important usability issues before even starting with the development phase. Paper prototyping also helps to highlight the missing functional requirements and when the picture gets clearer, sometimes it can even help to redefine the priorities.

Explanation of paper prototyping by Jared M. Spool: It’s still the simplest method we know for getting feedback about a design. All we need to do to learn about a design is to draw the redesign elements on paper and place them in front of our users, as if they are working on a real screen.

Before I knew completely about paper prototyping, I always got confused believing that my part of job (designing Photoshop compositions then developing sample web pages) itself covers the whole purpose of paper prototyping. But I never knew this paper prototyping is one of the best practice meant for the overall product interface and usability. At the same time it gives more precise specifications to the designers before start working on the product interface. If you are a designer, imagine that, how much time is saved when you don’t have to rework on any interface as far as the content is concerned. People can see more perfection in your designs when you are confident about the process of an application. You want to spend more time to enhance the look and feel thinking how it could it be more user friendly. You don’t have to waste your time fixing bits-n-peaces and doing content adjustment every now and then. So now, this is the time to say bye-bye to an imperfect process which could lead you to the failure.

Paper prototyping became popular in the mid 1990s when companies such as IBM, Honeywell, Microsoft, and others started using the technique in developing their products.

Here’s how it works

Paper prototyping is a team effort; the product team sits together to create a mock-up of the interface on the papers. They create hand-sketched versions of everything involved in the product, like windows, menus, pages, dialog boxes, pop-up messages, and so on. Team considers the most important audience to use the interface and prototypes are designed determining the tasks those users would do. After creating the prototypes, team members conduct a usability test. A person comes in, who is a representative of the audience and goes through the tasks using that prototype. On the basis of feedback from the user, now the team can discover the areas which work well and certain things which require more attention. It allows the team to iterate and improve a design based on the inputs from the user. The best part is, you can easily make required changes at the same time and no body has to wait for the next time until those issues are resolved.

It is always better to involve maximum people from the team to attend the paper prototyping sessions. Anyone can provide some specific ideas to make the interface more users friendly and moreover they would be able to predict well in advances if there will be any technical complications in future.

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One Response

1. Gopal Juneja August 4th, 2008 at 4:00 am

   agreed, paper prototyping can play the key role in the project apart from this a designer’s involvment will also increase in the project.

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