In Defense of Rough Prototyping
In recent conversation with a dear friend and fellow designer, the subject of paper prototypes came up. I found that immediately upon their mention he turned his nose up at the idea, citing that digital ideation and prototyping are now so fast and accessible, there is no reason for a designer to be dawdling around with something so primitive as pencil and paper. I spoke to other designers who were similarly younger than I, and found that they almost unanimously echoed this sentiment.
In that instant, it became clear to me that there was a gulf between the traditional practices I was trained in, and the way designers even just a few years younger than me actually operate in the field. It weighed on my mind — was I truly some ancient curmudgeon, stuck in my ways and unable to progress beyond the teachings of elder designers who are desperately trying to cling on to their golden years?
Probably not. Desperate to solve this conundrum (and perhaps to provide myself with some cheap validation), I began to research this issue — both to see if it was as widespread as it appeared, and to see if there really was any merit to my personal view that sketching and paper prototyping are essential components of the early design process.
Benefits for Users
I discovered many academic articles on the subject (Including Stephanie B. Linek & Klaus Tochtermann’s brilliant ‘Paper Prototyping: The Surplus Merit of a Multi-Method Approach’), and they all seemed to agree that generally speaking, usability testers don’t want to be perceived as negative people — this means that testers can often withhold negative feedback during usability testing, particularly in cases where it appears that the designer has gone to great lengths to produce a design.
So how can a prototype reflect the design of a product or an interface with visible ease, to save the user some testing guilt? No need to reinvent the wheel — paper prototyping. If we can easily produce paper-based wireframes for testers, even producing and changing them immediately in response to their feedback, there is tangible evidence for the tester that they can exercise a healthy amount of criticism.
Benefits for Designers
Personally addressing the perspective of designers is obviously easier because I myself am a designer. I definitely understand the other perspective — design tools such as Adobe XD and Figma can make it effectively as quick to produce higher fidelity digital prototypes than it can be to produce paper prototypes. Higher fidelity prototypes do lend themselves to a certain degree of consumer confidence which perhaps a crude drawing on the back of a napkin doesn’t inspire — I totally get it!
However, I think it absolutely cannot be ignored that sketching and paper prototyping provide a tactile experience that digital prototyping does not. Rather than concentrating on operating potentially quite complex software, designers are able to do the most natural thing in the world by simply putting pencil to paper. There is an essential ideation journey that takes place when a designer works with a platform that is so fluid and so naturally unthinking. Bill Buxton, a pioneer in human-computer interaction, expressed on the subject:
“Sketches are a byproduct of sketching. They are part of what both enables and results from the sketching process. But there is much more to the activity of sketching than making sketches.”
This perfectly encapsulates my point — putting pencil to paper and creating sketches or rough paper designs is not so much putting ideas on paper as it is a journey of ideation.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article! Feel free to reach out to me here.
