When to Use Paper - Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Define and Refine User Interfaces - page 241

War Story 5: Accidental Pornography
I was testing the e-commerce site of a reputable company. The user was completing an order form and
through a rather bizarre sequence of actions managed to access a porn site by accident. I was very
thankful that she and I were the only ones present and that she recovered her composure (mine was
pretty shaken as well) after I figured out what had happened and explained it to her. [ 1 ] In addition to
being embarrassing, there was some legal exposure (pardon the pun) here as well—earlier in that
same study, a user had arrived at the test facility without having signed the consent form. She first
wanted to ask me about what kinds of sites we would be visiting because she was uncomfortable with
some of the material available on the Internet. In an alarmingly prophetic choice of words, I reassured
her that if these sites were movies they'd all be rated G. If the porn accident had happened to this user,
she could have sued me.
Paper Prototype War Stories
You may have noticed that none of these war stories feature a paper prototype. In case you're
wondering where those war stories are, so am I! Honestly, I don't have any—in 10 years I have yet to
experience a situation where a paper prototype prevented a usability test from taking place. (I've had to
cancel paper prototype tests when users didn't show up, but that can happen in any usability test.) I've
also worked with development teams who were concerned that they weren't going to be ready in time,
but in the end they always were. Hmm.
My experience suggests that paper prototype tests are less vulnerable to some kinds of problems than
usability tests that rely on machines and other capricious entities. But equally important, I can think of
many cases where product teams tested prerelease interfaces and didn't have a disaster or where the
benefits of paper just weren't that compelling. So let's look at various aspects of your project—the
people involved, the stability of the technology, the kinds of tasks you want to test—so that you can be
proactive in identifying factors that might bollix up the usability study that you're planning. If a factor
doesn't seem to apply to your situation, feel free to ignore it. At the end of the chapter, I summarize
these discussions in a checklist.
[ 1 ] The sequence of events: After entering her last name, the user hit the Tab key. Instead of going to
the address field, the cursor went to the URL field in the browser. The user typed the first 2 digits of the
street address—19—before noticing that the cursor wasn't in the address field. She clicked in the field
and resumed typing. A couple fields later, she mistakenly hit the Enter key instead of Tab, which
activated the URL field, and we visited 19.com, a porn site.