April 15, 2003

Paper Prototype

I like Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox column on paper prototyping. Nielsen's extolls the virtues of this simple usability tool:

I'm here to tell you that paper prototyping works. There are many different grades of paper prototypes, and they all offer immense value relative to the time it takes to create and test them. I have run studies with nothing more than three different homepage mock-ups for a website, and still we learned a lot about how people would use the service and how our design concepts communicated to users.

I'm using paper prototyping on project right now, and it does provide a good deal of useful feedback--even before we put the prototypes in front of the users and stakeholders. Prototypes help to focus the system design before any of the backend code gets put in place.