"Paper in Screen" Prototyping a Rapid Technique to Anticipate the Mobile User Experience

Abstract

Prototyping is generally acknowledged as an effective method for generating cost-effective, preliminary designs of various products including web and mobile user interfaces. Out of the existing types of prototyping, paper prototyping is known for being the most cost-effective of them all, as well as the most constrained for the realistic user experience elements it can render. High-Fidelity prototypes on the other hand offer a richer experience to the user, at the high cost of developing sophisticated software/hardware-based demonstrations. Although both of these types of prototypes continue to be widely and successfully used in product and interface design, there is no evidence of a cost-effective technique that would elicit user’s feedback which as rich as high-fidelity prototypes but without implementation effort. This study proposes an innovative prototyping technique called “Paper in Screen” (Bolchini, Pulido, Faiola, 2009) which enables designers to cheaply and rapidly prototype a mobile application in its key components (interface design and mobile device integration) without the need for implementing a high-fidelity prototype. A study was performed with 10 user experience professionals to evaluate their perception of the technique’s effectiveness, from which a number of benefits and drawbacks of the “Paper in Screen” were learned. The obtained results point to areas of future research in mobile prototyping.