Just got back from a fantastic trip to NYC attending Lean Day UX. A bunch of great speakers in the morning was followed by an afternoon of paper prototyping and user testing.
ProtoShare was proud to be a sponsor of this event, and as I went through the paper prototyping exercises in the afternoon, it made me really appreciate the benefits that ProtoShare brings to the table.
Paper prototyping has some advantages: it’s relatively fast and can be done anywhere with minimal equipment. The drawbacks of paper prototyping for me were: difficult to revise and iterate, somewhat awkward user interactions, and incompleteness of the prototype. While paper prototyping a mobile app, we built pop-ups to drop on the sheet when a user clicked, we also built number pickers and date pickers, and tried to add many other layers of fidelity, with mixed success.
In spite of these drawbacks, paper prototyping can be incredibly valuable. Why? Because it gets your work in front of end users quickly. The feedback we got from crude paper prototypes challenged, validated, and illuminated our thinking on the problem we were trying to solve.
And all of these things are what I really love about ProtoShare. Sharing is fast, easy and built into the tool from the ground up. But with ProtoShare, iteration is fast and easy too. If I want to modify something, it takes a second. I can share with end users with the click of a button. I can view and interact with mobile prototypes on my device. And I can build popups, transitions, click states, and the other higher fidelity aspects that get end users more engaged with no more effort than a paper prototype. I can also show alternative design possibilities, modify the prototype on the fly in response to feedback and much more.
Thanks again to Jeff Gothelf, Neo and everyone else who made Lean Day UX happen. I know they’re planning more — so make sure to be at the next one!