Paper prototypes with children

Last week, I published a photo in Twitter, and it seems like I caused a storm in the UX world. It was not my intention, and here is the story behind that photo.

The photo of paper prototypes I shared on Twitter

I am a user researcher, and I have always been interested in user experience (UX) in education and public services. I started working with children for my Masters dissertation, ‘How to involve children in the design process’, and I have worked with different clients on a freelance basis to test websites and applications designed for children. I now run a Design Club with children aged between 12 and 14 years old.

Design Club

Design Club is a social enterprise, run by volunteers, mentors, professionals working in digital services. We believe the future needs people-centred designers to make the world a better place. The mission is to nurture empathy, collaboration and problem-solving skills in children. It is about teaching children the design thinking, the design process. It is not about teaching design tools or coding.

The Design process by the Design Club

Paper prototypes

I started running a Design Club at a local secondary school, last September. The club is on Friday afternoon, after school, from 3pm to 4pm. The sessions are extracurricular activities, they are optional for children to attend. Children and their work are not assessed, and children attend the sessions because they want to.

We started the club with an introduction to user experience and what we were going to do. We followed the design process. Each child decided which challenge to tackle, which problem to solve. In this case, we didn’t have any users available to talk to directly, so I created stories to help children better understand who they were designing for. We emphasised with users, we looked at some user needs, we looked at examples of other apps to get design inspirations, we started design and sketch the mobile apps on paper templates, to get the designs ready to be tested. I made mobile phones out of carton boxes, to be used with the paper prototypes and make the overall experience more real.

The tweet I posted last Friday — click on the image to see the comments

Benefits of using paper

There are many benefits in using paper to design and test mobile apps. Lily and Sophie have widely tweeted about them. Thank you both! We used paper prototypes in our club for these practical reasons:

• paper prototypes are used at the very early stage of the process. They help us validate our ideas, if users need our apps, if users understand our apps and find any early usability issues, missing information and functionalities
• paper prototypes are cheap and quick to iterate. A child who designed an app to buy vegetarian meals forgot to add the price to each meal. A quick test with his teacher made him realise that! He quickly changed the design before going home and testing it with other users this week
• children are not allowed to use mobile phones in school, while pens and paper are easily available in all class rooms
• children might need their parents permission to download apps on their mobile phones. I wanted to keep things simple
• the aim of the club is to teach children the design thinking and the design process.

The main reasons for publishing the photo last Friday were to show the children’s effort, to support the great work done by Design Club mentors and volunteers, and invite others to become volunteers and mentors too. It was certainly not to cause a storm in the UX world!