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April 16, 2003
Paper prototyping
Nielsen writes today about Paper Prototyping, and says that designers don't often use it "because it feels like you're cheating." He says that people believe something so simple and cheap can't produce results.
I think that's the wrong explanation: I think clients and project managers (and others) see it as offloading the design work to them; cheating in a slightly different sense, but also an issue of professional machismo. "If you're just going to ask users or clients early on, then you must not really know anything about UI design." Surely a good UI designer would be able to at least get the basic parts of the design right before showing it, the logic goes.
I've been denied prototyping access to users for the stupidest of reasons. A few I can think of:
- "We can't bother those guys, they're really busy." I was allowed about 20 hours of access to users over a five-month project for this reason.
- "Let's just get this right. It's common sense anyway." This is hard to argue with: am I so dumb as to not even know common-sense stuff? I hear this all the time from a client who I think has never watched anyone use his site, and who himself often stumbles through it.
- "We just need to get something up fast, then we'll worry about fixing it later." Any client who hasn't noticed that temporary solutions often become permanent ones probably doesn't have much experience with real development, and will probably cause bigger problems than this...
- "But I need to see it in polished HTML to be able to reall think about it. We need something that the programmers could use." Fine, you want me to bill you five hours to mockup some pages instead of fifteen minutes to draw it on paper, that's great. Don't forget, I'll have to do cross-browser testing and all that nonsense just to try out some ideas.
Others?
Posted by Andrew at April 16, 2003 10:51 AM
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You know, I've come across those same reasons and more. The way I look at it is this - you try to sell your process (paper or whatever you think is best) and if you can't you go with what the client wants. Sometimes, no matter how good it is for the client, you just can't win...
Funny thing is, I think something like paper prototyping would be fairly easy to sell than some of the alternatives as in theory it should be cheaper and faster.
But hey, if a client wants a full blown HTML prototype and is willing to pay for it...I mean I've often been in the "I told you so" phase of design, where you have to re-do one of those "temporary solutions become permanent ones" designs.
Some design firms, like drug dealers, know the real money is in the comeback. ;)
Posted by: Keith at April 16, 2003 01:24 PM
Heh, strange how everything in the "real world" is completely at odds with what I'm currently being taught in school. I'm taking 2 TLC classes right now where paper prototypes are perfectly acceptable. In one, the professor wrangled users on 2 separate occasions so we could test our prototypes on them. Of course, the class is called User-Centered Design, but it seems hard to imagine another approach now.
Heck, in one of my previous TLC classes, we *had* to turn in paper prototypes to show that we didn't jump straight from reading the assigmnent to creating a working prototype on the computer.
In Stefan's class we're learning about how people are just oblivious to "common sense" stuff; the most simple designs often are successful because people have taken care to look into the nuts and bolts and not just relied on what they think would work best.
Either way, it seems people want immediate results without taking the time to actually think and work through the solution.
Posted by: cristina at April 21, 2003 12:35 AM