Testing User Experience — Introducing Paper Prototyping
You have come up with an amazing user experience with multiple levels of awesomeness and engagement for life. At least in your head.
How can you test this? How can you test any of what you are doing?
Welcome to paper prototyping.
Paper prototyping makes you the product and little pieces of paper become screens. This works well for digital products, but the principle applies to hardware products as well. Here’s a great story about Palm.
The point is to pretend. To build ideas with paper or wood or cardboard or lint quickly and easily so that when you get to production, you are as specific as possible and don’t waste money or time. But what does this look like?
The idea is to create low fidelity versions of your idea and use them as a stand-in with users so that you can:
- Experiment with your ideas about how something should work
- Test your ideas about user flow
- Get feedback from users what they want the product to do
Let’s take a deeper look at each of these.
How something should work
There is something magical about playing at the idea. When you sit across from someone, and they give you feedback about what you are proposing your mind will come alive with new ideas and better solutions. I’ve had the entire direction of a product change doing this. We start with our best efforts, and when tested, we learn how it should work.
Test User flow
Testing how a user moves through or interacts with your product is a fundamental activity. When you are the computer or the product, you learn about how your user wants this tool to work and how they will interact with it. You will learn about points of friction (more on that later) and what you have right. How often have you used something and thought, “this is awkward!” By paper prototyping, you can avoid that or significantly reduce it by understanding how the user will interact with your product.
What they want
You are trying to solve a problem. At this point in the process, you have buy-in from your users that what you are building is something that will solve a problem for them. But when we “see the thing” then we know what we have. It’s one thing to describe something well and get buy-in. It’s a WHOLE different thing to take that same solution and have people interact with it tangibly. Don’t be surprised if you hear something like “That’s not what I thought at all!” This is how you find that out and fix it.
Creating a Paper Prototype
Ok, here’s how you can build a paper prototype.
- Get a Sharpie or comparable marker. Think and dark. Only one.
- Get a stack of index cards. I use Mr. Pibb’s Fine Paper. It’s pretty.
- Draw a screen that represents every step that you saw in your starfish exercise.
- Now get a user.
- Sit across from them and walk them through each step. When it comes time to do a “thing” have them touch the hand drawn screen that you have on the paper.
- Ask these three questions for each piece of paper:
- How they feel
- What they expected to happen
- What would they change
Then listen. And listen. You will learn more than you can imagine.
Lastly, without being creepy, invite your team to participate. You want them to hear from the user what they are saying. Let them soak it in and learn as well.
If you want a really good video training on this, get it from the master. Nielsen Norman Group has a 40-minute training video. It’s awesome. (Not an affiliate link)
