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If you're looking at novel solutions, then  paper prototyping is a great way of starting.
This is a relatively short segment on paper  prototyping,
which is something that I don't think people really take very seriously,
but they should do. It's a wonderful approach.
It's very *cheap and easy to do* – so, low technology, low cost;

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can be done at the *very early stages* of design and development;
*easy to create modify and animate* because you do all that by hand.
It *avoids distractions with superficial detail*;
a fixation that that button is too large or it's too small or it's too blue or what have you.
It *prevents* the you-must-be-very-nearly-finished impression that
sometimes customers get when  you're showing them higher-fidelity mockups,
without them realizing there's an awful lot of work that still needs to be done behind the screens.

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It's very much less intimidating to users.  Users really do get that you're trying things out,
and obviously they're quite keen to give you  useful feedback.
And tied up with that is the whole aspect that it just looks much more malleable,
much more unfinished than any form of screen markup.
So, as a concept, it's quite wonderful,
but we don't do enough of it.
It's not something you would actually do in an  area where you're *revisiting* the same solution.

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So, if your organization produces a lot of e-commerce sites and you've done
this particular kind of solution 10 times before, then obviously no need to paper-prototype.
But if you're looking at novel solutions, if you're the next big startup
and you want to make sure that people understand your proposition and they know how to work with it,
then paper prototyping is a great way of starting.

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So, here's Carolyn Snyder, a friend of mine, who  has written a book called *Paper Prototyping*.
It's not a fantastically long or detailed book,
but it does go through all the basics, and you can see just looking at this particular screenshot,
or paper-shot even – it's not of a screen of course – it's showing
little strips of paper that have been tacked on, and you can see that the cross on the

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– with color has just been applied with some sticky tape, literally,
and the text in the box underneath has been done the same way.
And it's just all done with users, with *a user*, typically,
and an agreed script, an agreed set of pages.
And you ask users to interact as if this was for real.
And they tell you what they would do, and you play-act it.
So, it's fairly standard office supplies. You can do most paper prototyping with about

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10 pounds', dollars' or euros' worth of office stationery.
You need to, as I mention here, make sure that you've *tested* your process
before the user arrives, that you know what you're going to do *if* certain things happen,
and you need to *agree with the team* what this process is meant to look like
so that you're not basically testing something different
from what the design team is proposing to do.