WebVisions started off Wednesday with an exciting hands-on learning experience. The idea to take note of is the fact that hands-on in this case doesn’t refer to a room full of tech nerds working away at their laptops. In fact, there really were no computers involved.
Justin Garrity, User Experience Director at WebTrends, was the session speaker at Paper Prototyping: Put Down the Computer and Collaborate. The first part of the session involved answering the question; what is paper prototyping. Paper prototyping, in its simplist form, can be described as a method utilized by multi-disciplinary teams with the most basic tools. The goal of this exercise is to collaboratively create user-focused site and application interfaces.
There are two words in this definition you need to focus on. The first word is multi-disciplinary. One of the goals of paper prototyping is to bring together the entire project team. This includes everyone from writers, to account service, to interactive designers and project managers. The idea is that the process allows everyone to be empowered in providing input and ideas into the user-interface design before the project ever moves into layout design and back-end development. In some ways, this method can be more efficient than doing traditional wireframes because as a group you use paper, pen, glue or Post-it notes to create the pages rather than a layout program. Many of us can sympathize with team member input after the fact and then having to adjust our layouts in Photoshop or our wireframes in InDesign or Illustrator or any other program you may use. Paper prototyping allows for quick changes.
The other word to focus on is user-focused. Paper prototyping should be utilized to design user interfaces for site navigation and data type placement as well as individual application interfaces. Justin showed examples of his previous work that utilized method for homepage content placement as well as specific application interface design. He talked about the immense value of creating use-cases that then lead to very specific scenarios. These scenarios are what are used for paper prototyping as well as user testing of the prototypes.
Paper prototyping is a process that can be used on projects both large and small and the exciting thing is that this post really only covers half the session. The second half of the session was hand-on development of a paper prototype. This process is really something that has to be experienced and I look forward to showing the rest of the team and practicing this process on future projects.
Great write-up!
Instead of using paper for prototypesthough, you might want to look into Magnetic Prototyping (http://www.MagneticPrototyping.com). It’s faster, looks more professional and great for the early stages of a project.
Clients also love it in collaborative sessions.
Anyways, that’s what I use.
-E