Joel ponders about
the best approach to prototyping and links to the new book called Paper
Prototyping. Unlike Joel, I haven’t given up on prototyping, but then
again, I’ve never actually spend more than few hours writing one. I
wanted to share a trick that worked the best for my team – whiteboard
prototyping. It goes something like this.
The core
team locks temselves in a room with a whiteboard (in our case we had one of
those fancy whiteboards with a device that can copy the contents on to a piece
of paper). The user interface screens are drawn one after the other, along with
key notes and use actions. Only the most important actions (such as d&d,
navigation, etc) get drawn. The notes are kept to absolute minimum and address
points that are confusing or ambiguous. Everybody understands that the end
result will not be as detailed as a requirements document. Once everyone is
happy with the drawing, it gets captured on paper (if you don’t have that
fancy whiteboard – try taking a picture with your digital camera). The screens
are then linked together using HTML clickable image map so that you can click on
a hand-drawn buttons to navigate from one screen to the next. The beauty of
this approach to prototyping is that it cuts the overhead to absolute minimum
yet creates a prototype that can be evaluated and critiqued by people outside
of the core team.
