Talk “Paper prototyping. Fast and easy way to making a good product.”

Speaker: Max Gaponov

Track: Product Management and Business Analysis
Audince Level: Practitioners

Good requirements describe usage of the product. But how can we make requirements “good”? How can we include all the tasks and activities needed for different users? How we can prevent producing a half-used product? How can we achieve straight connection between stakeholders, designers and developers? Moreover, how can we give any guarantees in the situation when all that we have for sure is the knowledge that most vital decisions will be made at the development process?

Ok. We’ve got wonderful approach for coding. It’s called TDD. We write tests first, and then we write code. And we continue writing code just up to the moment when tests begin to pass. This saves our time and and money. But is there such an approach for working with requirements?

Yes. And the answer is paper prototyping. There is no simpler and cheaper process than to gather all participants in one place, give them paper and pencils, discuss user tasks and activities, draw them down and organize results into an interface. Interface then can be tested, discussed again and refined. Yes, this process is iterative! Yes again, you have no need to write any single line of code!

In my keynote I’ll show how paper prototypes are built and what is needed for that. I’ll show some prototype examples and i’ll show how they can be tested and refined. And I’ll tell you how paper prototyping process helps in building connections between people, how it prevents misunderstandings and how it spreads the knowledge of the product through the whole team.