How effective is paper prototyping?

Carolyn Snyder who has recently published a book on paper prototyping has written this article on IBM developerWorks. Personally I don't like the concept of usability testing using Paper Prototypes unless the participants are well aware of GUI/Web design elements and can relate to the buttons as buttons and tabs as tabs...

How much longer does it take to develop a prototype using Visio or even Fireworks? If you're good with any of these tools, you could churn out the design in less than 20 minutes...

I'm not denying the importance of prototyping or even user testing. These are important stages of the process, but in my opinion a semi-finished computer prototype will work much better than the best paper prototype.

Also if you really want to test the IA, I would recommend sorting flash cards or even UML class diagrams as a good way to communicate the IA...

The paper prototype too has its place: I think it's a good way to communicate the design between designers and programmers. But showing it to the end-user, well...

Posted by Navneet at May 31, 2003 08:08 PM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam