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 prototyping software, interaction designers and screen developers can save valuable time, optimize communication within the team and build better websites for the web.

Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been in the know for a while to get a website started. The basic concepts of the layout will be put on paper and tossed around in the team. This prototype will then be put through a refinement process by implementing feedback from different stake holders. This paper wireframe will eventually act as a rough guide for the whole project – from start to finish. Some screen-designers even use these very limited paper prototypes for performing usability tests. Revealing usability issues in the prototyping phase can save a lot of money, since later changes in the so called ‘finished’ web project are minimized.

However, there are some drawbacks to Rapid Paper Prototyping.  Prototypes are not easy to add to the document servers and also difficult to collaborate on over different locations. Scanning paper prototypes and making them ‘clickable’ for testing use cases is also a time consuming task as we all know!

That is why many screen designers create their prototypes directly in MS PowerPoint or MS Visio and have them distributed to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the designs more effectively but it is not really more interactive than making duplicates of a piece of paper handing it to colleagues. The prototypes 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 specs. Again, more time and effort has to be invested to get the message across.

pidoco° has spotted this problem and made it their duty to tackle it by providing a really nice web-based interface design software.