Interactions - July/August 2009

mobile device, to be experienced and tested by users and designers. This inexpensive yet rich anticipation of the interface integrated in the device is a form of “experience prototyping” [ 9], as the malleability and provisional character of the anticipated situation still embeds some core ingredients of the final, natural experience—users interacting with the mobile interface while holding the device. A paper-in-screen prototype lends itself to “experience evaluation,” that can be carried out—as with fully higher-fidelity interfaces integrated in the device—also through field observation.

In essence, using paper-in-screen enables designers to reconstruct very early in the life cycle the synthetic aspect of the user experience, which is typically lost in the separation— due to pragmatic purposes and established practice—between interface design and device integration. Although this separation of concerns (interface and device) is practical and reasonable, the envisioning of the user experience traditionally suffers from the fact that this chasm is not reconciled until an implemented prototype is ready.

believe that strategies are needed to anticipate the mobile experience in as many aspects as possible and yet meet the time and budget constraints for agile prototype development. The paper-in-screen technique is an innovative proposal to meet this design challenge.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Davide Bolchini is an assistant professor in human-computer interaction at Indiana University, School of Informatics, Indianapolis.

Prior to joining IUPUI, he held positions at the University College London, Politecnico di Milano (Italy), and University of Lugano (Switzerland). His research focuses on conceptual design languages for the user experience, usability inspection methods, and user-requirements modeling for Web applications. He is vice president of the Swiss chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association and teaches graduate courses in usability evaluation and HCI at IUPUI.

Diego Pulido is an interaction designer at Pearson Education in Indianapolis and master’s student in the human-computer interaction program at Indiana

University, School of Informatics, Indianapolis (IUPUI).

[ 9] Buchenau, M., and F.J. Suri. “Experience Prototyping.” In Proceedings on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques. August 17-19, 2000. New York: ACM Press, 424-433.

Enabling Feedback from Users and Designers The nature of user feedback enabled by paper-in-screen prototyping needs proper consideration. As we have emphasized its potential of anticipating visceral elements of the mobile user experience, we also acknowledge its limited interactivity, due to the trade-off between cost (time and effort) and prototype refinement. Still, the direct transposition of paper prototypes into digitalized

form integrated in a mobile device generates an interesting outcome. In our experience, users interacting with paper-in-screen are surprisingly able to abstract from the limited interactivity of the prototype (as they consider it part of the work in progress) and raise issues on interface labels, content organization, and affordance, using context to provide suggestions for improvement. Interestingly, the elementary, though viscerally engaging, interactivity with the sequence of screens, provides the real-life experiential context not only to

focus on the interface usability, but also to facilitate the discussion on the overall utility of the application for realistic mobile scenarios of usage. The provisional and paper-like characteristics of the interface stimulate feedback on information architecture, navigation affordance, underlying business model, content, and requirements (behavioral level). It is clear that only higher-fidelity prototypes with more refined

design will elicit other issues concerning, for example graphics, layout, colors, and elements visibility (reflective level).

From this perspective, paper-in-screen can serve well not only traditional user-based evalu-

ation settings, but also expert reviews (heuristics inspection or walkthroughs), and participatory design activities. Experiencing the partial use of the application within the mobile device is helpful to stimulate discussion in the design team, to support individual inspections, or to enable bodystorming (enacting real-life situations of use).

With the increasing demand for mobile applications and their decreasing time to market, we

Anthony Faiola is the exec-
utive associate dean of the
School of Informatics,
Indiana University,
Indianapolis (IUPUI). He is
also an associate professor
and director of the human-computer inter-
action program. Faiola’s HCI research inter-
ests are twofold: First, in the area of cross-
cultural computer-mediated communica-
tion, specifically related to cultural cognitive
design and its impact on interaction and
information design, as well as the social
and cultural influence of “flow experience”
on gaming and virtual worlds. Second,
related to biomedical informatics, with a
focus on health information technology
(HI T) design and usability, which aims to
contribute to improving its usability and
provide the intelligibility of HIT concepts to
users through human-centered research.