Paper as a Design Tool

- Gerry Gaffney

The tendency to leap straight into implementation deprives many organisations of the opportunity to design their websites. In many cases there is no distinction made between design and implementation. By failing to design what they want, companies build what they can.

In a typical scenario, the job of website design is handed over to the person who is seen as having the appropriate skills, meaning the ability to use tools such as DreamWeaver, Flash or FrontPage. This approach has several disadvantages. It gives control of the design to personnel who might not be best suited to understand the users, it excludes many stakeholders, and it tends to limit design options. It often leads to designs that do not support non-expert users, because the developers are not sympathetic to their needs.

It is not unusual to see web development projects that have become bogged down in an endless cycle of build and review, with technical developers at loggerheads with marketing or business personnel.

There is one web design tool that is universally accessible and simple to use. It has been applied successfully in other design fields for may years. The tool is paper.

Paper prototyping is now gaining increasing acceptance from an industry slow to embrace, or even acknowledge, old technologies. In Australia, it is used by large and small companies in a whole range of industries, including telecommunications, marketing and information technology, and by government entities establishing new or enhanced Internet services.

The use of paper-based design provides many benefits. It is inexpensive and quick. In particular, it supports participatory design, in which a variety of stakeholders (often including customers) get together to mock-up interfaces designed to meet user requirements.

Paper prototypes can be used to gain feedback from within the business and can also be used to validate design decisions by having customers walk through a design.

This approach to design is also an excellent way to identify and address issues that may otherwise not surface until after implementation, when they are extremely costly to remedy.

Paper prototypes help ensure that early design decisions are based on the requirements of the site from the customer's perspective, rather than from the perspective of technical departments.

You can buy all the equipment you need for designing with paper at your local stationery shop.

The ideal kit contains some A3 or flipchart paper, a few colored markers, a pair of scissors, and stick-on notes.

For presentation and evaluation purposes, graphic designers can take these paper prototypes and incorporate visual design elements such as graphics and appropriate layout.

By designing in teams with paper, the design process becomes democratic. Instead of the control of the process being in the hands of the most technically proficient person, it is shared among all participants.

It is often necessary to convince technical personnel of the value of using paper. They may suggest that it is a waste of time. However, once they've tried the technique, few people would consider doing design in any other way.

Most developers know that developing a throw-away prototype as a proof-of-concept is an excellent idea; they also know that such prototypes are notoriously difficult to throw away, since they appear (particularly to management) to be fully functional.

This problem is eliminated by using paper prototyping.

It is always clear that paper is being used purely as a design tool and the use of paper effectively separates design from development activities.

Architects have known for years that you don't design a building by sending in the cement trucks.

Gradually, the IT and web-development community is coming to realise that skipping the design phase is simply inappropriate and that one of the most effective ways to design is on paper.

It is time that all organisations in the market for a new website realise that they do not need to be technologically proficient to specify what they want.

However, they must be proficient in using an appropriate medium to communicate their design ideas and requirements. To do so, paper is an excellent tool.

After all, if it doesn't work on the back of an envelope, it won't work on your customer's browser, no matter how much money you spend on the technology.

Note: This article first appeared in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers, under the title 'The Write Stuff'.