I was really looking forwards to paper prototyping, and read Carolyn Snyder’s
I wanted to use this technique based on advice from my tutor to figure out if my UI is intuitive enough; I’ve managed to fit all the elements I want to show of the media player on one screen, and have missed off a few widgets (like the song progress bar, and length and genre information) which could be considered risky. It’s of wasting a lot of time coding I could jot the idea down on paper and ask a focus group of users to let me know what they thought of the idea on paper. Super quick, in theory. If they don’t like it, I can literally pencil the changes in.
It could also help with the flow of the application, removing the will the user understand that they have to click this bit of the UI to get to this page..? worry. You ask them to do a task (“Can you add a song by Coldplay to the now playing queue.”) and then see how they go about doing it. Was it easy for them? Could they instantly find the play button?
But as I mentioned, problems occurred.
The first issue was that I did it on paper. “Paper prototyping” is a misnomer, as paper is too light. Too easy blown away by a sneeze, and too hard to pick up to move around. You need something heavier, like card. This wasn’t an issue though, I could just get some card (I actually had a tonne of card stock lying around.) However, it meant redrawing what I’d already done onto the card.
The drawing was very, very hard for me. Simple boxes would end up being horribly unaligned, in such a way I couldn’t fit the rest of the elements on (which would easily fit on a screen when done with CSS). My play button looked more like an oversized equilateral when next to the badly drawn next track button. The book mentions, as well as everyone else, that good drawing isn’t a requisite. But it wasn’t something I could be any more than embarrassed about.
My ill fated attempt with recreating my UI on paper
I decided to try an do it all on Photoshop, and print the elements onto card. That’d get rid of my issues with drawing. I spent two hours today in a lab trying to use Photoshop to create an empty rectangle with a stroked edge. That’s definitely not a piece of software you can pick up and play with. You need training, which I can’t get and don’t have time for. This is not a rapid way of doing testing, like the book boasts.
My prototype would have to be fairly data heavy too; sample track titles and artists on individual bits for the user to be able to drag around. Once they move to another view, I’d have to spend a few minutes sorting on the paper, only for the user to potentially decide to “go back” and have to redraw it all again.
Paper prototyping is usually carried out by a number of people – at least three really. Snyder says maybe two, but that’s an absolute extreme. Pushing myself down to a session with just one person is incredibly hard, I expect.
None of these issues are issues with the testing method. It’s more a reflection on my constraints. All of them can be fixed with having more people, and one of them with marginally better skill at drawing sketched boxes. However, it is what it is, and I won’t be able to use Paper Prototyping.
I’m glad I learnt about it though, and will definitely be trying to use this again in the future when I’m in a team at work.