Hello UXPin friends and, hopefully, soon-to-be-friends who just stopped by on our blog.
„…Redesigning paper prototyping? Doesn’t it sound silly? Well, we worship innovation and believe in a change harder than Obama does. We have urge to make things better, bigger than Timberland (which has a slogan „Make it better!”). Nope, we didn’t have any doubt that you can actually make paper prototyping better, more complex, rapid and convenient…”
We believe that the Internet is based on sharing. Sharing thoughts, stories, ideas. That’s way we’ve decided to share with you the UXPin story. What’s more, UXPin is also strongly connected with the idea of sharing. Hm… Isn’t it bullshit, as we’re selling UXPin not giving it for free? Well, let me start our story from that point.
There are three human beings who co-founded UXPin. Three human beings working for 5 days a week, 8 hours per day as a UX/R&D team in one of the most important eCommerce companies in the Eastern Europe. We work as a team and we love it. Though we’re from different parts of the wide UX field (interaction design, information architecture, design) we get along well.
We were and we are using paper prototyping a lot. Our desks are full of sketches. We know merits and flaws of it, as everyone UXer knows. One day we thought why not to redesign it as we do with web projects.
Redesigning paper prototyping? Doesn’t it sound silly? Well, we worship innovation and believe in a change harder than Obama does. We have urge to make things better, bigger than Timberland (which has a slogan „Make it better!”). Nope, we didn’t have any doubt that you can actually make paper prototyping better,more complex, rapid and convenient.
We were thinking about many differents solutions and we’ve tried dozens of it in practice. Only one though met our expectations. Probably you know which one.
And yes, though it seems crazy, we paper prototyped paper prototyping tool. In couple of iterations we’ve checked how it works in the real environment of website prototyping. Have a look on the original picture from prototyping UXPin process below:
After few days we were sure that we are up to something important, something which may change the way people are designing new web products. Why we were so sure? Let’s think about flaws of paper prototyping:
If you do classic sketching and you make a mistake, or want to change your idea, you need to sketch whole concept all over again (hate it!).
If you’re conducting usability tests with paper prototype it would be great to provide quick changes in the prototype. With classic paper prototyping it’s hard to do.
If you want to pass your paper prototype to your boss, developers, clients – they tend to rise their eyebrows, like you didn’t make anything impressive.
And now think about UXPin. By mixing wireframing and paper prototyping we overcame flaws and created new advantages. We immediately thought that would be great chance to spread the idea of paper prototyping all across the world and actually make it wider idea than ever. Why PMs, developers and graphic designers shouldn’t use paper prototyping along with UXers? Of course they should. You just need to encourage them and make things easier.
That’s why we’re sharing UXPin with you. And yes, we believe that it’ll make web a better place.
