Paper Prototyping, by Carolyn Snyder. Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.
The “Scandinavian design” tradition in human-computer interaction says that people should be involved in creating the systems they will have to use. Electronic tools for rapid screen design may provide a high-fidelity view of how a system will look, but they do so by creating a privileged group (the software people who know the tool). Paper prototypes overcome this by putting everybody on an equal footing. Furthermore, they do so cheaply.
Snyder describes how to create and use paper prototypes of user interfaces. While she describes some systematic ways to use them, this is a lighter approach (and less broad) than something like Constantine and Lockwood’s Usage-Centered Design. That doesn’t diminish the book’s charm. I particularly liked the chapters that showed how to construct pages for panes, scroll-bars, etc. It left me feeling like, “I could have worked my way here, but somebody’s done the work for me.” (Reviewed Dec., ’03)