What is Paper Prototyping?

Paper Prototyping is the process of sketching or drawing the entire design layout or design structure of an application on paper or notebook. UX developers usually sketch or draw each icon, text box, menu bar, title bar, other drawings, and so on on paper. This representation is an initial design layout before it proceeds to final template development to hand it over to front-end developers. There are also some software through which we can create the pencil sketch of an application digitally.

Paper Prototyping

What are the Uses?

Paper Prototyping is useful in many ways. It is the process carried out by UX developers to help the development team or other teams understand the design layout or design structure of an application.

1. Representation of the entire web application:

Paper prototyping is helpful in sketching the entire layout of an application to present it to the review team to explain the structure of the application.

2. Easy Process:

It is one of the easiest ways to create the layout for web or mobile applications. It requires good drawing and layout creation skills.

3. Cost-effective:

All Organizations found this process as cheap and cost-effective. We don’t require any tools or licensed software to create the layout. Instead, we are using notebooks or papers to represent the entire layout.

4. Easy Understanding:

Developers or other teams can easily understand the flow and structure of the design. UX developers usually keep the design format as simple as possible.

5. Contributed to Various Layout Sizes:

With the help of paper prototyping, we can create the layout design for many screen sizes such as desktop view, tablet view, mobile view or other devices view.

6. Excellent Documentation:

To document the paper prototyping is an easy process as all the designs are arranged sequentially in notebook or papers. It is very helpful in reviewing the design. It eliminates the process of recreation of separate documentation to submit for review.

7. Easy Modification:

If any changes required in the layout, then we can easily make the modification by just erasing the design which needs modification. It requires minimal effort to make modification.

8. Coding knowledge not required:

In paper prototyping, we don’t require coding knowledge to style the designs even though when we are developing the paper designs digitally using software tool.

Benefits

Paper Prototyping has many benefits because of it’s simplicity and easy process. Let us see some of the benefits of paper prototyping.

1. Simplicity: Paper Prototyping is one of the simplest design process to carry out for all kinds of applications. Creating the design layouts at each level of application is simple and can be verified easily without need lot of time to review.
2. Cheap: It doesn’t require special software tools to design the layout or testing the layout. We can simply carry out all the designs in paper format by sketching and verifying it by manually.
3. Fast Process: It is one of the fastest process for UX developers to sketch the designs as it requires drawing skills to create the planned design. If UX developers are good at sketching then it will be helpful for them to complete the sketch quickly.
4. Easy for testing: There is no automation tool required to test the entire design layout. We can easily validate or test the designs on our own and we can find the defects in the designs.
5. Various Layout Designs: Paper Prototyping carries out the different screen resolutions design layout for an application. UX developers will sketch the same designs for all screen sizes.
6. Requires minimal learning: It requires good planning and sketching skills to build the design for an application. It doesn’t require coding style knowledge, automation testing knowledge or other stuffs to learn.
7. Documentation: Once paper prototyping is done, the documentation process becomes very simple. We can take the printout of the original design to arrange for the documentation.

Limitations

Paper Prototyping is not useful for all applications due to some limitations associated with it Let us see the limitations of paper prototyping.

1. Color Patterns Limitations: It is very difficult to create the paper layout with various color designs. We can’t add some specific colors to the layout.
2. 3D or high level design: Some applications require three dimensional design layouts for an application. In such cases, paper prototyping won’t support some set of three dimensional designs. It is impossible or difficult to carryout the high dimensional designs.
3. Unable to Know about CSS styles values : Since paper prototyping is manually sketched by UX developers, front-end development team can’t know the exact height, width, padding, margin, border or other sizes of each component designs.
4. No Coding: There is no way to use coding to style the designs. In some cases, it limits to stick with particular design modal and can’t proceed with higher level of styling.
5. Digital Assets: There is limitations for some digital assets to be created on paper designs. Digital assets such as some high level dimensional images, icons, buttons or other components can’t be reproduced in the paper prototyping process.

Conclusion

From the above discussion, we could conclude that paper prototyping is useful for some set of components in applications and not suitable for some set of components in applications. Before starting with paper prototyping, you need to decide what are the components can be sketched. There are many guides to paper prototyping and you can utilise those to create your design layout using paper prototyping process.