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User Experience (Usability)
286 hits
| Aug 21, 2003 2:56 pm |
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re: Thinking about paper prototyping |
David Orr
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Good Point, Nick. I read an article by Jakob Nielsen (“The Usability Engineering Life Cycle,” Jakob Nielsen, IEEE Computer, March 1992)one time that makes the point that using only one type of usability testing has its limitations. He had a table that listed some of the methods and their good points and limitations.
I remember, he said that some methods like heuristic inspection are better for picking up detailed issues and others like formal testing are better at dynamic issues like navigation or issues about concept.
I'll look around and see if I still have the article somewhere or can find it on the Internet.
David
> Nicholas Gracilla wrote:
> > David Orr wrote:
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>>I had the experience of being able to compare low impact paper prototype testing to formal lab testing. This happened because my company had usability tested a new software product for Motorola in our lab, so we had the results. Later, I was teaching a seminar on usability for STC/Northern Illinois University's Technical Communicator's Professional Development Program. I set up a paper prototype of the same software, meaning that we only used screen prints, not online prototypes or software. We usability tested the paper prototype.
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>>The facilitator (I) acted as the computer, shuffling the screen prints as necessary to show the person playing the user role where a certain action would take them. They had scenarios for performing certain business tasks, just like in a formal usability test. We had observers and loggers--all taken from among the students.
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>I'd like to think through methods and limits of paper prototyping. Here, David points to task analysis: asking users what they'd do to accomplish such-and-so. This is particularly useful in working through the details of, say, a membership renewal process or other complex task.
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>Recently, I did a (not paper, but flat digital) prototype for a client site that aggragates high quality news sources for specific interests. On the paper prototype, we noted the number of aggregated articles in each navigation section link -- thinking, from the home page, users get a sense of how much content to expect in each section.
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>During the paper prototyping, everyone loved it. But during the HTML prototyping, where the user interfaces were 90% active, it was disliked. "I can click on 'politics' or the number, so why bother?" "I don't get the number." "It's telling me something I don't need to know."
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>So a feature in the paper prototype gets removed during the interactive prototype. I suppose this happens all the time, but it was interesting to note. Perhaps the number of articles per navigation section is really a content item, and shouldn't be tested for in paper prototypes?
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>Nick.
> Private Reply to David Orr (new win) |
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