Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Chapter 8. Paper Prototyping

While prototyping in the browser is useful when you’re starting to imagine how a given function or section of a site might work out, it’s also a lot of work. If you’re not sure about a given bit of design logic, or how a certain piece of the user flow will work out, it could take a lot of time and energy to try to prototype the interaction in Drupal—and if you end up realizing that the solution you’ve created has usability problems, or is best done another way, it can be frustrating to “throw away” all the work you did.

One way to deal with this uncertainty is by using paper prototypes. Paper gives you the flexibility to move things around when they don’t work, or to try out complex interactions, in a way that doesn’t require you to throw a bunch of time into code. It also has the benefit of being extremely portable, and it lets you try out ideas on the fly. By showing a paper prototype to a user and having them show you how they would go about completing a given task, you get quick access to usability problems that crop up in your designs. Most importantly, once you discover those problems, you can get more information about why the problems occurred, and make changes to your prototype on the fly.

This is the single most important point about paper prototyping. Where a usability test involving a piece of software or a website that’s already been built can reveal usability issues that you have to tackle later, in the iteration process, ...