magpiebrain

“Paper prototypes”:http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/us-paper/?dwzone=usability are a great tool for quickly designing and demonstrating GUI. Sometimes however the interactions can be a little hard to see – in which case a GUI-prototype can be a boon. Problems can come however from knocking up these dummy interfaces – management and users can get the idea that the product itself is nearly done, or they may start obsessing on little UI idiosyncrasies that aren’t really the point of the exercise. Ken Arnold’s “Napkin Look and Feel”:http://napkinlaf.sourceforge.net/ is an attempt to give coded interfaces a paper-prototype feel – so users get a clear idea that this is a rough draft and nothing more. The webstart demo sows the SwingSet demo using the new look and feel, and it seems to work very well.