Bibliofile Project: Paper Prototyping

After having spent a decent amount of time sketching, I arrived at a few general models which were just complete enough to throw at a few testers. So, the natural choice was a series of paper prototypes constructed around the goals of my personas.

My findings were simultaneously encouraging and humbling. The email model for general navigation and curation seemed to work very well. I had a tester who was not a Gmail user, but had no trouble utilizing my very Gmail-eque model. However, the visual network model for comparing and exploring highlights did not test tremendously well.

I should rephrase that slightly. The actual visual network model was not too bad. After users played with it a little, they understood and liked it. However, getting them to this area was probably the task most fraught with confusion. The main culprit would be the unfamiliar pattern of selected data (in this case, a checkboxed highlight) remaining selected and present despite committing other parallel tasks (in this case, searching for another highlight).

There were, of course, plenty of other smaller findings that are invaluable, but the above seem to be the general themes.

Paper Prototype Documentation

Below are three PDFs documenting the three goals as completed with the paper prototype.

Bibliofile Project Posts

Introduction
Personas
Initial Sketching
Paper Prototyping

Tags: books, design, design process, ebooks, education, interaction, interaction design, prototype, testing