Prototyping With PowerPoint

re: Prototyping With PowerPoint

Tom Bradley — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 18:33:53 GMT

We've done some similar stuff with interactive pdfs. It's true, this sort of technique does give a good feel for how a product will function.

Trouble is, it basically just provides equivalent functionality to the next button, with the user moving though the application one screen at a time. We've tried to be more ambitious with hyperlinking to differant parts of the document, but the whole thing gets very complicated, very quickly.

I just wondered where you draw the line? Do you attempt to make a prototype that provides the interactivity of a number of features, or do you concentrate on the flow of one linear task?

Sensorydrive - Stuart Church’s blog » Quick prototypes with PowerPoint

Sensorydrive - Stuart Church’s blog » Quick prototypes with PowerPoint — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 18:39:39 GMT

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Prototyping With PowerPoint

Microsoft Views — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 18:54:59 GMT

We use PowerPoint as kind of a better version of paper prototypes. This technique has several advantages:...

Prototyping With PowerPoint

Computer Views — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 18:55:01 GMT

We use PowerPoint as kind of a better version of paper prototypes. This technique has several advantages:...

Prototyping With PowerPoint

The Buzz — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 18:55:05 GMT

We use PowerPoint as kind of a better version of paper prototypes. This technique has several advantages:...

More PowerPoint Prototyping

Sodaware::Blog — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:15:29 GMT

Jensen Harris just posted a walkthrough of how Microsoft prototype using PowerPoint. It&#8217;s almost identical to the way I&#8217;ve been doing it, although I prefer to build the entire UI from shapes and images before creating a detailed picture

re: Prototyping With PowerPoint

Martin Woodward — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:40:45 GMT

Done exactly the same thing myself in the past - I've found that if you try and go above the standard linking behaviour then users sometimes get confused as to what actually has been implemented and what has not (sometimes a problem if using other forms of mock-ups)

We also used UltraVNC to allow the developers to watch multiple user desktops from a different room as they interact with the mocked-up system.

Like you said in the Bob entry - the scroll button still works (as do the keyboard shortcuts) - but it is an effective and a very cheap way to prototype...

re: Prototyping With PowerPoint

jensenh — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 22:00:22 GMT

Tom,

We definitely use this technique for non-linear prototypes (that the reason for the second half of the walkthrough.) It can be complicated to keep straight in your mind once you have a large number of slides, but we've found it easier than the alternative.

re: Prototyping With PowerPoint

Dan McCarty — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 01:20:11 GMT

We've used Visio pretty heavily for years for our software mock ups, which has led me to a few observations:
- Visio is great for raw screenshots

- PowerPoint is better for moving around with invisible buttons and "action settings."

- (Visio 2K3 might be better than our 2K2: according to the upgrade matrix it lists better VBA support for automation)

- People don't really care about the mock ups until you've actually written the software. (I call this the baby rule: no one cares about the baby until you've had the baby.) At that point everyone and their brother is all too willing to chime in what they like and (in most cases) don't like about it

- Using a powerful mock up tool like Visio, you have to be careful to to make something look too good. Coding that gradient-filled, shadowed button with a perfectly-scaled icon and anti-aliased text is a lot harder than the 30 seconds it takes to create it in Visio!

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Re: Visio & Powerpoint

Christian Hagel — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:56:38 GMT

We have used both Visio and Powerpoint. Usually we make the screens in Visio and make them interactive in Powerpoint.

Things are quicker and easier to get nice (not pretty) & precise in Visio than in Powerpoint. We create shapes for our designs and share them in our group and make heavy use of background pages in Visio.

If I could change just one thing in Visio 2K3, it would be the way you copy between pages. In Powerpoint, when you copy a shaoe from slide a to b, it is inserted at precisely the same position. In Visio it is just inserted in the center of the page. Visio has other quirks for UI prototyping, but generally works well.

re: Prototyping With PowerPoint

Tim Briggs — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 00:01:06 GMT

I'll chime in as the researcher and consumer of Jensen's prototypes. We ran a lot of them in the iterative design stages.

As some have pointed out above, unless everything works, you do run into people clicking some elements that might not be hooked up yet. It really wasn’t that problematic though. First, these were very interactive—we didn’t see many instances of participants becoming less interactive as the session progressed. Enough of their clicks resulted in some feedback. Second, editing the prototype was simple enough that if we saw a bunch of people click without seeing feedback, we could very easily adjust the file on the fly. (In some cases, we even had participants turn off their monitor while we remotely made the change from the other side of the one-way glass.)

That said, paper prototypes still have a place in our world in the really early concept phases. Before we're worried about mechanisms and layout, there’s nothing quite like watching people shuffle paper and rewrite labels to better understand how they might approach a UI.

A final little tip we ran across, applicable to any early prototyping medium. Because it can be hard to ‘see’ a click when there’s no feedback (e.g. not everything is hooked up), we used a screen recording application that put a little starburst around the cursor which could only be seen on playback. It helped us see some things we might have missed in the live session and didn’t disrupt the user.

re: Prototyping With PowerPoint

Renato Almeida — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 21:33:31 GMT

Simple enough tips but yet very powerful. Powerful to the point to make me ask: how far can you take this prototype to the developers and not let anyone misinterpret draft ideas put into the powerpoint? In other words, how do you find the point of equilibrium between accuracy and simplicity in the Powerpoint presentation?

re: Prototyping With PowerPoint

Kingsley — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 02:26:55 GMT

I've used this technique before. I wish it was easier to do hyperlinks within Powerpoint presentations though - I'm sure you must have felt the pain. I wonder if you made it easier or treated it as a fringe case.

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re: Prototyping With PowerPoint

Juan Leal — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:11:28 GMT

We also use Power Point prototyping in our company (www.idealista.com).

Honestly, sometimes we feel we should change to another software, but things like the one you mencioned above make us forget the ppt interface problems and keep on going :-)

Thanks for your post.

Juan

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re: Prototyping With PowerPoint

John Marshall — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 16:12:13 GMT

For those using Visio for the screen prototypes, you can add hyperlinks to a Visio drawing to switch to other Visio drawings. So it is possible to get an interactive display of a UI in Visio. (Visio is one of Microsoft's secret products)

elevate|blog » Windows Defender, Disk wiping, and Power Point prototyping

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re: Prototyping With PowerPoint

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Storyboarding in Software Development, with particular reference to Microsoft CRM

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Today, I’d like to share a few notes on a processes we’re using when designing UI features on the CRM

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