Paper Prototyping with DENIM
This entry was originally at http://kingsley.blog-city.com/read/103186.htm
A while back, Joel had blogged about making paper prototypes. Paper prototypes are one of those things that everyone agrees are a great idea, but which hardly anyone actually practices. The basic problem is, it just seems like it didn’t take a lot of work. You can just imagine what those tech guys are gonna say - “You get payed to doodle ? Do you know how difficult it’s going to be to code that?”. The point is, the paper prototyping technique is so valuable precisely because the prototype can be thrown away. I want to make a rough design, see how users attempt to use it and then try to improve that design as fast as possible and test it again. The more time we invest in building prototypes, the less willing we are to change it. Paper prototypes also help to get around the “iceberg problem” as Joel puts it. The “iceberg” is a perception management problem, where the client or the manager who has seen the prototype assumes that the bulk of the work is over. This is because almost all non technical people equate software with user interface. Anything underneath that is a murky muddle of acronyms. So when they’ve seen a finished UI, they assume that the project won’t really take that long to finish.
For those of us who’d like to try out paper prototyping, there’s a great tool called DENIM developed by the Group for UI Research at UC Berkeley. If you have a graphics tablet or some other pen input device, it lets you sketch an entire prototype. For example, to make a link, you sketch a graphic or scribble some text, and draw a line from it to the title of another page; and a link is created. There are a number of advantages to making paper prototypes on computers - you don’t have to go looking through your stack of paper screens when the user says she would click that link, for instance. Of course, you can also use it without a graphics tablet, but it’s a little less spontaneous that way. Now what I would really like to see, is a version that runs on my Handspring, so that I can start sketching rough UI’s at meetings and then refine them at my desk. Or maybe it’s time to get a tablet PC, the Handspring screen is too small for most ideas. Does anyone have any good/bad paper prototyping experiences to share?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2003 at 4:28 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.