Getting started is easy, you can just sketch out whatever comes to your mind. But to create more useful prototypes, consider some of the following tips:
Begin with the user
By starting with your user in mind, you can ensure your product helps them with the goals they want to achieve. Here are a few things you can consider:
- How does each screen of your app fit in with the tasks your user wants to do?
- In what context will your app be used?
- Will the user be driving?
- Will they be running?
- Does your user need to sign in?
- Will there be a news feed?
Starting with your user goals can also help you have initial thoughts about an information architecture.
Once you have some ideas, just sketch them out. Heres some great templates to get you started
Vary the fidelity to gain appropriate insights
Make sure the fidelity of your prototype matches the type of insight you want to gain.
By keeping it very low-fi, and excluding colours, fonts and interactions, it can ensure the feedback you receive stays high level, and allows you answer questions about the layout and structure of your app.
You don’t want to be hearing “that would look better in Helvetica” or “what if you changed that button to red?”
As you get more certain about your designs, you can begin to take more time on them, as the type of feedback you want to receive changes.
When it comes to increasing your prototype fidelity, you can even go as far as making them interactive. You can do that with the Marvel mobile app, to turn your static wire frames into clickable prototypes
This is one of the fastest ways to progress from a paper prototype into a digital one of higher fidelity. Just take pictures of your screens and add hotspots to make your paper prototypes interacve
Exploration exercise: think across devices
When paper prototyping, we’re not always sure what screen size our designs will end up on, so it’s great to start by thinking about all screen sizes. A simple ‘paper folding’ exercise can help you do this :
- Take one A4 sheet— that’s your desktop screen— how would you design for that?
- Fold it in half, that’s your tablet or small laptop— now you’ve got less space
- Fold it in half again and that’s your phablet
- Followed by your phone and watch
Whilst this is nice to help you prioritise content and features, sometimes you already know your app is only going to be used on mobile devices- maybe it’s a sports app to be used when running. Or maybe you’re creating something specifically for a large screen— an office stats board for example, or something for old-school office workers who only have 15” box monitors.
Therefore a lot depends on context, but this exercise can help you think from different angles nevertheless
The Future of Paper Prototyping
We’ve only really visited designing for screens in this article, but what about applying paper prototyping to other mediums such as Virtual Reality? Let’s finish with a brief look at how some designers are approaching VR prototyping with paper
In addition to paper prototyping templates for VR, we’ve also started to see Sketch templates popping up. Whilst not paper, it’s interesting to see how we can approach VR in 2D environments. Maybe we apply lessons from Sketch templates to paper too
Limitations of paper
Whilst paper prototyping is awesome, there are of course some limitations to it. For instance, it needs a lot of imagination from the user which can make it less accurate. Furthermore, Jake Knapp of Google Ventures argues that whilst paper prototyping is great for starting things off, they’re not ideal for user testing. This could be true to a certain extent, but it can be argued that apps such as the mobile version of Marvel (which let us make our paper prototypes more useful and interactive) can make user testing with paper much more viable. You can send your prototypes across the world and even record how people use them, without watching over them.
Get Started, and Get Everyone Involved
Overall, paper prototyping a great way to get people involved and explore early ideas. Since it’s so useful in those early stages, it’s also the perfect opportunity to get the rest of your team on board and engaged with the design process. Then, as you move forward to higher fidelity designs, your team is more likely to stay involved. For example, in our spotlight with Huddle, we found that Marvel prototyping tools are used not only by designers, but by product managers, quality assurance teams, developers and commercial teams. So getting them in early, can keep them in sync throughout.