Paper Prototyping

Chapter 1 Introduction

Paper prototyping is a widely used method for designing, testing, and refining user interfaces. In the early 1990s it was a fringe technique, used by a few pockets of usability pioneers but unknown to the vast majority of product development teams (and often considered pretty darn weird by the rest). But by the mid-1990s, paper prototyping was catching on. People at well-known companies (IBM, Digital, Honeywell, and Microsoft, just to name a few) experimented with the technique, found it useful, and started using it as an integral part of their product development process. As of 2002 paper prototyping is not considered nearly so weird, and the technique is mainstream practice at many companies, both large and small. There ...