Co-operative paper prototype design
1st December 2011
This interactive exercise on paper prototyping was done as part of our World Usability Day event held at User Vision's head office.
Paper prototyping is a widely used method in the user-centered design process, a process that helps developers to create products that meets the user's expectations and needs - in this case, especially for designing and testing user interfaces. It is throwaway prototyping and involves creating rough, even hand-sketched, drawings of an interface to use as prototypes of a design. While paper prototyping seems simple, this method of usability testing can provide a great deal of useful feedback which will result in the design of better products.
What we looked at
We asked our participants to design a new iPad app for a supermarket. They could base their ideas on the current website or on one of the sketches provided by other participants
We showed them how the current website for Waitrose looks in the iPad and we asked them to define user requirements by commenting among them what they thought it should be included on the new app.
Once we had the ideas written on post-it notes, we asked them as well to draw those ideas using iPad templates, different colour markers and their imagination.
Outcomes
After the activity we had a great list of user requirements and a lot of new ideas for the new design.
If this activity was part of the real project we could have asked participants to rate those requirements by the MoSCoW scale and get a starting point for the project to focus on.
Furthermore, the paper prototypes can be used for creating early designs of the new app screens and be tested or for defining app functionality on a visual way.
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This article was written by Paula Mestre. Paula is a User Experience Consultant at User Vision, a usability and accessibility consultancy that helps clients gain a competitive advantage through improved ease of use.
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