Tuesday, January 20, 2009
User interface prototyping is a powerful tool, the effective use of which can save hundreds of man-hours, increase the quality of applications and enable better application architecture. The importance of prototyping should not be understated, I've worked on several projects where we wasted a lot of time 'fixing' and 'improving' the look and feel of the application during user testing, this could easily have been avoided if we'd simply PROTOTYPED the user interface first.
In one of these projects our prototyping phase was axed due to tight project deadlines and a perceived user confidence about what they wanted to see and how they wanted it to act. Of course the project ran well over its deadline, and the users had many (many) UI changes once they got their hands on a working copy. These changes were not only to do with application usability, but the organization of key elements, things they now realized were missing, and sometimes fundamental changes to the way things needed to work. Instead of sitting on user confidence at the project outset we should have ignored them completely, pushed back our deadlines and designed the interface properly.
The benefits of prototyping an application are well documented. Jakob Nielson notes that even simple paper based prototyping can dramatically increase ROI, it can also solicit feedback, meaning you can fix problems early, adapt your architecture, or even switch to a different technology.
An argument against prototyping would be that it can take a lot of time or is an unnecessary cost. But think about it this way, if you do simple prototyping it will cost you the time of 1 analyst with basic developer input, alterations are easy to make as you don't have to change any code. In contrast, if UI issues come out in testing you need to document what's wrong, create time-consuming code changes, and retest. In my example, this happened 3 or 4 times before the users were even slightly happy. We could have made an awful lot of paper prototypes with that kind of time investment!
I guess my point is, PROTOTYPE THE UI BEFORE TOUCHING YOUR CODE. The UI is what the user sees, the UI represents your final app. If your UI is terrible, the user won't care how intricate or well made it is underneath the surface and you'll waste a lot of time setting it right. I've learnt the hard way, hopefully you won't have to!
