Paper Prototyping

LinkedIn has a cool feature that let's you ask a question of your whole network. This morning, someone in my network asked this question:

Tools for visualising interactive prototypes? What do you prefer?

Powerpoint, ConceptDraw, Omnigraffle, Flash, Ruby on Rails?

We are reviewing the tools we are using to help visualise interactive storyboards and concepts for our clients. What are other people using? How important is it that the tool supports experimenting with real data and conditional branching in order to explore with the development team the consequences of their design decisions?

My reply:

Consider Paper Prototyping.

It is low cost, easy to do, and will quickly teach you how a real user will react to the system. With a paper prototype, a human acts as the computer, so your prototype can support some very sophisticated logic without the need to create code. Modifications are trivial, encouraging experimentation, discovery and improvement. I was skeptical at first, but after using it a few times I have become impressed with the power of this tool.

Photo courtesy of Nertzy

Comments

[Hillary Johnson]

I too am a big fan of sketching. When your goal is to brainstorm, it is generally best to use the least mediated medium available to you--and nothing is faster than putting pen to paper. Also, you can go sit outside somewhere, which can help make you feel more creative. Nothing quite like sketching the wireframes for a website while sitting under a tree....