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One happy finding was that it was okay for cpselect to differ from other tools that users had worked
with. The product team had worried about this because the market for technical computer software is
highly sophisticated and some of The MathWorks' customers had written their own software
applications to help with image processing. If customers were accustomed to a different way of doing
things, they might not like cpselect. Fortunately, because cpselect incorporated the features users
needed but with a simpler interface compared with the home-grown tools, its differences proved to be
benefits rather than drawbacks.
Customers Are Happy
All in all, the team conducted five rounds of paper prototyping, refining the interface after each.
(Although the "five rounds" may sound arduous, each round included only two or three users, and the
team went from a blank slate to a ready-to-implement design in about 3 months, while working on other
projects at the same time.) The resulting interface was much different than what they'd started with,
and the product team believed it was also much better. Although the paper prototype didn't answer
every question they had about the interface, there was a much smaller (and highly focused) set of
issues to be solved later in the development process when a working version was available.
The Control Point Selection Tool shipped in April 2001, and customer feedback indicates that the tool is
easy to learn and helps them do their image registration work. Their biggest request is not for bug fixes
but for new tools to automate even more of the process. Jennifer Lymneos, a Usability Specialist who
worked on cpselect, adds, "By the end of paper prototype testing, months before the tool was released,
we were confident that the design was a good one. None of the feedback from users has contradicted
what we learned from the paper prototypes, nor has it been related to fundamental aspects of the tool.
In fact, many of the enhancement requests are small things like where the legend should go and what
its title should be. For the first release of a brand-new tool, I think that's a pretty good indicator that we
got the basics down right."
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