Rapid Web prototyping using PowerPoint

Here's a cool idea from Jensen Harris for times you want to put Web product concepts in front of users in a more robust format than a piece of paper or static storyboard screen. Harris explains how to use PowerPoint to provide a multiscreen online experience with some lightweight interactivity.

We use PowerPoint as kind of a better version of paper prototypes. This technique has several advantages: prototypes can be made to feel somewhat interactive, because the content is electronic it can be modified more easily than paper, and (best of all) the usability participant uses the mouse and is on the computer, so it feels natural to them.

GUUUI made reference to this tutorial amid discussing the benefits of using Visio for the same thing. Though Visio prototyping appears more powerful, many more of us have copies of PowerPoint installed, and some knowledge of how it works, than do Visio.

Use the right prototying method for what you hope to accomplish.

If you want to get reactions to a broad branding or image concept from a few users, paper or static screens will get the point across. Some experts advise you can even use paper prototypes for early-stage usability testing.

If you want to test specific task flows with multiple screens in a user interface, especially if it's an A/B test (which flow works better? this or that?), something like the PowerPoint or Visio method seems to offer more precision. Just keep in mind that most common methods for testing usability still are qualitative, though very helpful to product developers if structured well. The more precise you try to make your simulation, the more the returns on that precision diminish in user testing, and the more expensive the test.

That would seem to argue against building out full HTML structures for user testing of prototypes, unless you go in with a high degree of confidence that at least the majority of the build work will survive the test. It is much easier to have that confidence now that standards-based design makes it easier to use minimal, semantic HTML for architecture, and CSS and scripting to manipulate visual presentation and behavior on the fly.

What do I do? Assuming I want to test something more granular than I can represent in a napkin drawing, I usually storyboard in Photoshop and then build an HTML structure with hyperlinks to represent screen-to-screen flows. It just doesn't take that much time if a designer has bothered to learn HTML well in the first place.

I may try the PowerPoint method, though, to see if it saves time on user test setup for rapid deployment projects. As always, your mileage may vary.