From Rapid Paper Prototyping to Digital Prototyping

For the people who are into interface design, Rapid Paper Prototyping is old school! But ever considered doing screen design on screen?

With pidoco’s web-based interface design software, interaction designers and screen developers can save valuable time, enhance the creative process and build better interfaces for the internet.

Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been known to be the solution to get a web-application started. The basic concepts of the layout will be put on paper and tossed around in the team. This prototype will then go through an iterative design process by integrating feedback from colleagues or even clients. This paper prototype will eventually act as a rough guide for the whole project – from start to finish. Some screen-designers even use these basic sketches for performing usability tests. Revealing usability issues in the prototyping phase can save a lot of money, since later alterations in the so called ‘finished’ web project are minimized.

However, there are some drawbacks to Rapid Paper Prototyping.  Prototypes are only scanned to add to the document servers and also difficult to collaborate on in larger teams. Transforming paper prototypes into clickable wireframes for testing use cases is also a time consuming task as we all know!

That is why many companies create their concepts directly in MS PowerPoint or InDesign and have them distributed to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the data more effectively but it is not really more dynamic than making copies of a piece of paper handing it to the team. The Visio-type static wireframes still do not show the real capabilities for test user excitement:  links, dynamic menus and combo-boxes etc. cannot be reproduced effectively and need to be explained individually in long text. Again, more time and effort has to be invested to get the message across.