Paper Prototyping is a method which helps developers create design ideas, which meet the user’s expectation, and allows for testing user interfaces using paper and markers. Yes, paper and markers! It is a visual method which allows developers to plan before getting into the programming part. Here is video explaining what it is, LINK.

Last term, I used this with my year 8 students. The learning outcome for students was to design the user experience of a digital system, generating, evaluating and communicating alternative designs (ACTDIP028) ​. As we are an Office 365 school, I decided to present students with a situation which is relevant to them. I presented students with the following scenario:

The problem: When using Office 365 Word Online, Office 365 Yammer or Class OneNote, your client has expressed some issues which they would like resolved. The problems include:

For Office 365 Word Online:

• When sharing a document, the layout is messy when multiple users are editing the one document
• When sharing a document, you can see who is editing live, but with they finish editing there is no record of who edited what
• Users can delete another users’ work
• Users can simply copy and paste from the Intnet

For Yammer

• After a user creates a group Yammer page, users are posting inappropriate or irrelevant commnts
• When a lot of comments or posts are made, the page is hard to follow for a group project

For Class OneNote

• After your client (teacher) has set up a Class OneNote the collaborative space is very disorganised
• Users are posting random comments
• Comments are not identifiable as to whom posted or shared
• Users are deleting each other’s’ contributions to the collaborative space

Students were allocated to one of the 3 problematic areas and asked to use paper prototyping to create design solutions. Below are some of their ideas, I couldn’t share them all as students featured in many of the videos, and for privacy reasons cannot be shared online.