Yesterday I put away my laptop and got back to basics. I was working together with my good friends at Liveline in developing the early stages of interface design and user journeys for Reference Tree – an interesting new project that will allow university students to license academic textbook content by the chapter.
The point of the exercise was to forget about logos, colour schemes and other visual design elements and focus on getting the early stages of usability ironed out and to work with students to get input on how they would use the site. The great thing about paper prototyping is that you can very quickly mock-up a possible design solution – and if it doesn't work, you just redraw an element and try again. It's a very liberating process in this way – you are not hindered by the time and resources needed to develop full wireframes, and most importantly anyone and everyone can get involved in the design process.
It was very interesting for me watching the students as we talked through the user experience, as every one of them used the interface slightly differently, and it was a real eye-opener to how what seems obvious to the designer can often be seen completely differently by the user. One case in point was the use of a preview icon in one of the prototypes which was a magnifying glass with a '+' symbol in the middle. To me this seemed like a fairly universal symbol to view more details about something. But when asked where to click to preview a book only half of the students went for the icon.
Overall I found the process very useful both in terms of my general understanding of user journeys and in helping to understand the specific project that lay ahead. Paper prototyping is by no means an exhaustive usability testing process, but it's a great way to start things off and weed out any early interface pitfalls.
For a more in-depth look at paper prototyping check out some of these articles:
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