Rapid Digital Prototyping
For the people who are into screen design, Rapid Paper Prototyping is old school! But ever considered doing screen design on screen?
With pidoco’s web-based prototyping software, information architects and web developers can save valuable time, easily integrate other stakeholders and build better usability for the web.
Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been in the know for a while to get a web-application started. The idea is to sketch the basic concept on paper to be discussed within the team. This prototype will then be put through a refinement process by incorporating feedback from different stake holders. This paper prototype will eventually 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 performing usability tests. Revealing usability issues in the prototyping phase can save a lot of time and budget, since later alterations in the so called ‘finished’ website are minimized.
However, there are several drawbacks to Rapid Paper Prototyping. Prototypes are difficult to add to the project repository and also difficult to different departments. 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 prototypes directly in MS PowerPoint or other diagramming tools and have them distributed to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the data more effectively but it is not really more dynamic than copying 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 text. Again, more time and effort has to be invested to get the message across.
pidoco° has spotted this problem and made it their task to tackle it by providing a effective web-based interface design software.
February 15, 2010 No Comments
