Coding Horror: UI-First Software Development

Quotes from Jef Raskin on this:

    * Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.

    * Users do not care about what is inside the box, as long as the box does what they need done.

    * As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.

It is more than 'paper prototypes' -- you actually need to know how the system should work, from the users' point of view.

Ben Cchneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/) took this a step further in 1987: design the documentation first:

Shneiderman, B. (1987), Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

I referenced the technique in my thesis, and proposed it for aircraft autoflight systems!

http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/37310/1/ICAT-2000-3.p...

I introduced paper prototyping at the place where I was working & it's amazing how much it can help you define your product. It's a great way to side-step the feature-bloat trap at the specification phase in waterfall development. We focussed on finding out what not to build. I work in a pretty risk-averse environment & was surprised how well it was received.

It really gets interesting when you do it on wallpaper. I usually use the 30" brown wrapping paper from CVS or Wallgreen's, a lot of duct tape or masking tape, and different colored markers. Much better than a white board because someone gets to keep it.

Just this week, a client called me in to review a wallpaper prototype I did for him 2 years ago. He posted the whole thing in another room, gathered his team, and said, "Let's get started on this."

Funny, everybody in this week's session who was also in the first session looked at the paper and vividly remembered that day, even the food we ate while we did that.