Project: eCommerce- 5 Takeaways from Paper Prototyping

When considering whether I should provide full, unbiased documentation of every project that I have completed at Ironhack, I thought about how many Medium posts were actually out there. Instead of numerous case studies, I have decided to, for this project, talk about the top takeaways I had from my first project where I had a test-able paper prototype. These are in no particular order.

For context, for this project, we were asked to design a website for a local commerce store, specifically for the online side of their business. My group chose a local ice cream van. Being the height of summer this was partially for the product testing, I mean who doesn’t like ice cream, but mainly because it provided an interesting challenge. What does an ice cream van need a website for anyway? The deliverable for this brief was a mid-fi prototype, however, my biggest takeaway was in the testing states of our prototype.

1-You can throw it away

One of the biggest takeaways that I had from this project was that, despite being potentially on the lower end of mid-fi, this is not a precious artifact. A paper prototype is not something that should be found at the end of a tomb, guarded by an obnoxiously large boulder that even more obnoxious tomb raiders should try and steal.

This story may get contradictory at points but, at the end of the day, the concept of a paper prototype is just that. Work hard on it (which I will come to later) but also it is going to get thrown away. When that is accepted, then it will become a valid tool to test with users.

2- It won’t look the same when you’re done.

When we started to test with users, it became clear that we had forgotten an overlay or a key micro-interaction. Instead of panicking, we threw a post-it note onto the paper prototype and went on our merry way testing.

3- Shut up. Let the prototype talk

This is a habit that I forced myself out of quickly. At the start of testing our prototype, I fell into a dangerous game of trying to talk the participant through the prototype, instead of actually giving room for everyone to breathe and tell me what’s up.

4- Make it quick, but good

Like I mentioned previously in this article, this may be contradictory. I talked about the temporality of the paper prototype, and that this is a high-speed tool. One of the struggles that we faced in the earlier iterations of creating the paper prototype was that people were having difficulty figuring out what is clickable. Obviously, when UI is included in this then that problem is fixed. However, it forced us to be creative with how we presented the prototype.

Also, I made a workable progress bar that moved throughout the prototype which may be one of my proudest moments of this project. See below.

5- They make cool videos

This may be quite a superficial takeaway from my first interactions with paper prototyping, however, I do believe that it is an important thing to mention. The role of a UX Designer is somewhat about communication. Just as we need to communicate to users, we also need to communicate to stakeholders, clients and other designers. Sometimes they may not understand what paper prototyping is or how valuable it can be in the Design Thinking process. And sometimes hey, in reality, an interesting video can get the point across more.

I learned a lot from this project. Some of the things that I have written about may make you, probably as a designer, go ‘yeah, duh’. However, these were things that when put into practice, really hit home.

Project in conjunction with fellow Ironhack students Benjamin Fuller, Thaddeus Emu, and Levent Feizi.