Introduction - Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Define and Refine User Interfaces - page 18

Chapter Overview
In several years of teaching paper prototyping, I've found that the most natural learning sequence
doesn't necessarily follow the way you'd do the activities in real life. For instance, it's easier to
understand some of the strengths and weaknesses of paper after you've made and mock-tested a
prototype, or lacking that experience, at least seeing plenty of examples.
This topic is organized into four parts. Depending on your background and interests, it may make sense
for you to read the chapters in a different order than how they appear in the topic.
Part I—Introduction
The next three chapters provide an introduction to the what, why, and how of paper prototyping: what
paper prototyping is, why it's useful, and how to prototype various interface widgets.
Chapter 2 , Case Studies: Several detailed examples of usability studies conducted with paper
prototypes are included so that you can see the sorts of things that companies learn from them.
Chapter 3 , Thinking about Prototyping: A lot of reasons, both practical and psychological, are
provided to help explain why paper prototyping is a useful technique. In addition, some of its
drawbacks are discussed, although the details are reserved for Chapters 12 and 13 .
Chapter 4 , Creating a Paper Prototype: The widget-level view of paper prototypes and how to
include interaction, help/documentation, and hardware are discussed. This chapter is presented
out of its proper order (logically, it's part of Chapter 7 ) because some people find it useful to see
many examples when first learning about paper prototyping.
Part II—Process: Conducting a Usability Study with a Paper
Prototype
This is the practical, how-to part of the topic. It assumes you've decided to try paper prototyping, so it
describes how to go about it. (Those who are still undecided might want to read Part III first and then
come back to this section.)
Chapter 5 , Planning a Usability Study with a Paper Prototype: This chapter includes an action plan
of the activities, people, and schedule you'll need when you're ready to try paper prototyping. (If
you're already familiar with how to conduct a usability study, you may want to skim this chapter.)
Chapter 6 , Task Design: Good usability tasks are vital in paper prototype testing. This chapter
explains why and how to create good tasks.
Chapter 7 , Building the Prototype: The process of creating a paper prototype around a set of
usability tasks and holding internal walkthroughs to prepare for usability testing is described in this
chapter. (Refer to Chapter 4 for details about how to prototype specific interface widgets.)
Chapter 8 , Introduction to Usability Test Facilitation: For those who haven't previously conducted
usability tests, this chapter provides enough guidance to get started. Testing with two users at a
time (a.k.a. co-discovery) is also discussed. Experienced facilitators can probably skip this chapter.
Chapter 9 , Usability Testing with a Paper Prototype: Everything from how you explain paper
prototyping to what you do when a user tries to do something you haven't prototyped is covered.
Chapter 10 , Observers: Observers are an integral part of usability testing. This chapter explores
the benefits and risks of having observers in the test room and how to ensure that they will behave
appropriately.
Chapter 11 , Data: Capturing, Prioritizing, and Communicating: This chapter describes how to take
good notes and prioritize the data you've collected and also discusses ideas for capturing and
communicating what you've learned from your prototypes.