WOZ pro: a pen-based low fidelity prototyping environment to support wizard of oz studies

Abstract

Because they are easy to create and modify, low fidelity prototypes are commonly used in early evaluations of user interface designs. Designers typically use either pen-and-paper or various computer-based tools to create and test low fidelity prototypes; however, our informal analyses of these existing technologies indicate that they do not optimally support the two key, complementary tasks of (a) prototype creation and (b) wizard of oz testing. To address this problem, we have been developing WOZ Pro (Wizard of Oz Prototyper), a pen-based software environment for the quick and easy creation and testing of low fidelity user interface prototypes. We are designing WOZ Pro to be as easy to use as pen-and-paper, but to hold key advantages over pen-and-paper and existing computer-based tools. When designing interface screens in WOZ Pro, designers can easily (a) propagate a design change to other related screens, and (b) specify the set of screens that are reachable from a given screen. In a wizard of oz test, WOZ Pro reduces the cognitive load on the wizard by allowing navigation only to those next screens that are valid. We are planning a controlled experiment to compare WOZ Pro against paper-and-pencil along several measures in a set of prototype creation and evaluation tasks.