Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been established as THE way to get a web-application started.

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

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

Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been established as THE way 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 be put through a refinement process by implementing feedback from different stake holders. This paper prototype will finally act as a rough guide for the whole project – from beginning to the end (but is there a real end?). Some screen-designers even use these very limited paper prototypes for running usability tests. Retrieving problems in the use cases 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 several drawbacks to Rapid Paper Prototyping.  Paper prototypes are difficult to add to the document servers and also difficult to share between team-members. Scanning paper prototypes and making them ‘clickable’ for web testing is also a time consuming task as we all know!

That is why many companies create their sketches directly in MS PowerPoint or MS Visio and have them distributed to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the screens more effectively but it is not really more dynamic than making copies of a piece of paper handing it to the team. The prototypes 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.
A small company from Berlin, Germany has noticed this problem and made it their duty to tackle it by providing a really nice web-based interface design software.