UX Design: 6 Paper Prototyping

- [Chris] Hello, I'm Chris Nodder. Welcome to the sixth installment of the UX Design Techniques series. In this episode, we'll discuss creating paper prototype designs to test out your ideas before you write any code. This is the sixth course in a series that describes a set of techniques you can use to make your development process more user-centered. We started off with an overview of the user-centered design process. Then, we covered how to gather and analyze user data, and then used that data to create personas, so you know who you're developing for, used ideation techniques to make sure you came up with creative solutions, and showed how scenarios and storyboarding help you fill in design gaps.

Now, you'll bring all this information together as you create a prototype of your interface and use that prototype to get early validation of your design ideas. The final course in this series will show how once you've validated your paper prototype, you'll use all this information to better plan your development cycle. This course covers the methods you can use to get fast, cheap validation that you're on the right track with your designs by creating low-fidelity paper prototypes, and using them as the basis of a usability test with representative users.

The process of building and testing the prototype will uncover lots of potential issues, but because you're working in paper, it's incredibly quick and easy to change things on the fly, as you find each problem. By finding the issues now, you'll start the actual development process with much more confidence that you're on the right track. Now, it's time to dive in and create some paper prototypes for your new interface. So let's get started.