Case Studies - Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Define and Refine User Interfaces - page 24

Software: The MathWorks
Contributions by Jennifer Lymneos, Mary Beth Rettger
This paper prototype from The MathWorks is of the Control Point Selection Tool (cpselect), which is
part of the Image Processing Toolbox 3.0 ( Figure 2.1 ). This application is used by scientists to align
images (for example, from geographic surveys) to detect differences between them. The user works
with an overview and detail view of each image, choosing comparison points at the same location on
each image.
Figure 2.1: As shown by this screen from its documentation, the Control Point Selection Tool lets
the user examine two images, including an overview and detail area for each. Clicking on any
image adds a control point to the appropriate location in the other images.
In 2000 The MathWorks was working on the first release of cpselect. They had done their homework
and knew a fair amount about their user population and requirements, but the developers were having
a tough time getting started. In a scientific application such as this there are many technical details, and
the team was getting caught up in them before they even had consensus on the high-level approach to
the interface. So they created a paper prototype ( Figure 2.2 ) and conducted several rounds of usability
testing, refining the prototype as they went.