From Rapid Paper Prototyping to Digital Prototyping

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

With pidoco’s web-based wireframe software suite, interaction designers and web developers can save valuable time, easily integrate other stakeholders and build better interfaces for the web.

Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been established as THE way to get a web-project started. The basic concepts of the layout will be put on paper and shared and iterated within the team. This basic screen concept will then be put through a refinement process by implementing feedback from clients, test users and colleagues. This paper-built screen will eventually act as a roadmap for the whole project – from start to finish. Some web designers even use these very limited paper prototypes for performing usability tests. Retrieving problems in the use cases before programming can save a lot of money, since later alterations in the so called ‘finished’ web project are minimized.

However, there are several drawbacks to Rapid Paper Prototyping.  Sketches on paper are only scanned to add to the project documentation and also difficult to share between team-members. Transforming paper prototypes into clickable wireframes for testing use cases is also a time consuming task as we all know!

That is why many screen designers create their sketches directly in MS PowerPoint or MS Visio and have them send to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the data more effectively but it is not really more interactive than copying a piece of paper handing it to the team. The digital sketches still do not show the real capabilities for test user excitement:  links, dynamic menus and work-flows etc. cannot be reproduced effectively and need to be explained individually in long paragraphs. Again, more time and effort has to be invested to get the message across.

pidoco° has noticed this problem and made it their task to tackle it by providing a easy web-based interface design software.