Testing Paper Mock-Up of Homepage

By Jakob Nielsen, May 1995
Sidebar to article about usability testing for the design of Sun's website in 1995.

Usability lab set up for paper prototype testing: oversized color printout of homepage placed on desk, within an area marked by masking tape.

Initial usability studies were done using paper prototyping. We printed out early homepage designs on a color printer. The printouts were magnified to compensate for the poorer quality of the color pixels in the printout and to make it easier for the observers to see what the user was pointing at.

The test was conducted by showing the page to users and asking them to first comment on their general impression of the page and then to point to any element on the page that they thought they could click on and tell us what they expected would happen. This simple method provided us with early feedback indicating the importance of a prominent placement of the month name (since we wanted users to know that the page would change monthly) and the need to make the "What's Happening" bar look very clickable.

The photo shows version B of the homepage "on the operating table," but we ran paper prototype tests of many more versions. It's the beauty of this method that it allows for very rapid iteration and tests of many alternative user interface designs.

A nice trick for paper prototyping (which Meghan Ede suggested to us) is to tape up an area of the desk with masking tape. Marking up an area usually ensures that the user keeps the printed page within the area without a need for the experimenter to try to stop the user from moving the printout around too much. We preferred having the printed page stay within a set area to facilitate video taping as well as observation by other team members in the control room.

Learn More

See also my 32 minute film, Paper Prototyping: A How-To Video.