On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 08:58:33PM -0000, jhrothjr wrote:
> I believe paper has one real advantage over other modalities: the
> customer can't possibly believe, on any level, that it's a working
> application. The UI designer above may have wanted to use a paint
> application to emphasize this point.
This is a huge issue. I think it's often hard for programmers to
understand the gulf of understanding when it comes to visiblity and
GUIs and prototypes.
Took look at it from the opposite direction, I remember the early
stages of my current project, where I had 90% of functionality
completed and working, but I had yet to go back and wrap all the
pretty look & feel HTML tags around the functional form interface.
The CEO was really getting twitchy in his concern about deadlines, and
was astounded a few days later when I showed him the version with all
the pretty colors.
Think of it this way - when you deal with a business-person and
he tells you "trust me, the details we agreed on are going to be in
the contract", how twitchy do you feel when he hasn't delivered a hard
copy of the contract yet? How do you feel when you realize you can't
understand the language in the contract when he *does* deliver the
hard copy?
This is the state of mind he's in when you're talking about
what's in the code, but he just can't see it yet.
On a side note, when I first read about paper prototyping when I
started doing usability back in the early nineties, I thought it'd be
useful to get a sheet of magnetic/plastic material from a sign store
and use permanent markers to create a bunch of stock UI elements.
(I'd done something similar for a boardgame, back in college). Never
did, but I keep wondering how well it'd work.
--
Steven J. Owens
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"I'm going to make broad, sweeping generalizations and strong,
declarative statements, because otherwise I'll be here all night and
this document will be four times longer and much less fun to read.
Take it all with a grain of salt." - http://darksleep.com/notablog
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