thirteenPAPER PROTOTYPING
FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2003
Years ago, the Excel team was trying to figure out if it would be a good idea to allow users to drag and drop cells using the mouse. They had a couple of interns "whip up a prototype" suitable for usability testing, using the cutting-edge Visual Basic 1.0. Building the prototype took all summer, because it had to duplicate so much of Excel's real functionality or you couldn't do a real usability test.
The conclusion of usability testing? Yes, it was a good feature! The programmer in charge spent maybe a week and completely implemented the drag-and-drop feature. The joke is, of course, that the whole point of creating a prototype is to "save time."
A year later, another top-secret Microsoft team ...
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