From Rapid Paper Prototyping to Digital Prototyping

Everybody who is into interface design, Rapid Paper Prototyping is old school! But ever considered doing screen design on screen?

With pidoco’s web-based screen design software, designers and web developers can save valuable time, easily integrate other stakeholders and build better interfaces for the internet.

Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been known to be the solution to get a web-application started. The idea is to sketch the basic concept on paper to be discussed within the team. This prototype will then go through an ongoing, sometimes collaborative, design process by implementing feedback from other stake holder. This paper-built wireframe will eventually act as a guideline for the whole project – from beginning to the end (but is there a real end?). Some screen-designers even use these sketches for running usability tests. Revealing usability issues in an early stage of development can save a lot of money, since later changes in the so called ‘finished’ website are minimized.

However, there are several drawbacks to Rapid Paper Prototyping.  Sketches on paper are difficult to add to the document servers and also difficult to collaborate on in larger teams. Transforming paper prototypes into clickable wireframes for testing use cases is also a time consuming task as we all know!

That is why many companies create their prototypes directly in MS PowerPoint or MS Visio and have them distributed to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the data more effectively but it is not really more dynamic than making copies of a piece of paper handing it to other stake holders. The Visio-type static wireframes still do not show the real capabilities for test user excitement:  links, dynamic menus and work-flows etc. cannot be reproduced effectively and need to be explained individually in long paragraphs. Again, more time and effort has to be invested to get the message across.

A small company from Berlin, Germany has spotted this problem and made it their mission to tackle it by providing a simple web-based interface design software.