Paper Prototyping

ARTICLE SNIPPET - Once your website is designed, how do you determine the user's reaction? One method would be to do user testing, which provides great results at an equally greater cost. But before you begin live testing, you should participate in a less obvious and much less expensive method: paper prototyping.

Getting the design of your website right often proves to be a daunting task. The development costs alone for creating a website with a unique value proposition can be staggering. Our inside joke on that is, "How do you create a $10 million web business? Start with $38 million and work your way down." Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to guess what your customers expect? If you could only see how they would use that shopping cart... or that wish list, portfolio wizard, or matchmaker that you think will bring hoards of visitors to your site and make them lifetime buyers! The good news is YOU CAN—and without writing a single line of HTML code. If you have paper, pencils and some simple office supplies you and your team of designers and developers can ask users to test your website before you even build your first page. And someone has finally written the book to help you do it.

Carolyn Snyder, a 10-year veteran of helping companies design better software and websites, has published the definitive "how-to" for using paper prototyping as a method of designing usable effective websites, software and webware. Paper Prototyping is a fact-filled handbook, jammed with case studies, helpful images and processes that will have you creating websites that are more intuitive, efficient and aesthetically pleasing.

In a highly competitive market, usable intuitive websites and software get a powerful competitive advantage. Creating usable, intuitive products simply cannot be done without user involvement. Development is expensive. Paper prototyping is not. Ergo, getting users involved in the design of your website or software upfront, using a paper prototype to test the concept and design is good business sense.

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