But in addition to paper prototyping,
there are also tools that can help you prototype.
So when somebody's prototyping with paper,
a person or a researcher has to act as the computer or
the wizard to actually switch out different parts of the paper prototype.
And essentially, be the interactive portion that the person uses.
However, tools can actually help you link parts of an image or
wireframe together with hotspots, so that nobody has to act as the computer.
So the person can actually click through and
they'll be taken to different parts of your sketch or wire frame automatically.
Now, there are a lot of different tools that can help you with this.
Everything from PowerPoint,
which lets you just set up some hotspots or links between slides.
Two tools that are meant specifically for this purpose.
There a lot of these tools in fact too many listen.
I'm sure new ones are coming out all the time and they relative benefits and
draw backs.
We're not going to go through all of these tools here, but
I just want to introduce you to tool based prototyping and
then maybe we'll do a few examples, of tool just to get you started.
So if you watched the paper prototyping video,
you might know how to create a paper prototype.
Let's say, I wanted to create a movie recommender system,
that's someone that a group does a lot.
And I wanted it to be able to recommend movies based on a location that
you're going to.
So that you can learn more about a particular location.
So this is what a paper prototype might look like.
So I've specified how you would search for something,
I specified that I would have tabs.
I specified that there would be movies with information about each movie below.
And this is just on a piece of paper,
and it's just a regular paper prototype that somebody may be
able to point to an area in order to transition between different screens.
Now here's what that same prototype would look like as a wireframe.
So this is a wireframe done in Balsamiq, so as you see,
it's still fairly underspecified.
So I don't have specific images to represent each movie,
I just kind of have an x for that.
And I just have something that says, movie info,
rather than actual movies and titles.
But different areas of the interface are specified, and
in a tool like Balsamiq I would be able to link.
Let say, the category tab or the recommended for
you tab to another interface.
Have a percentage rack with it and when they click on that hotspot,
iIt will automatically take them to that new wireframe.
I can also get even higher fidelity.
So here's the same idea in PowerPoint.
So this is not actually something that's functional, but
what I did is I took images, I created the tabs.
Then I took images off of the Internet and I assembled them in the way
that looks like the type of interface that I'm trying to achieve.
So here you can actually see the actual movies, and
it actually looks the way the real interface might look.
Now there's benefits and costs of doing it this way.
So the positives of doing tool-based prototyping is that you don't need
a wizard to actually transition between slides.
So this can help you get more accurate visibility metrics.
Because as somebody is actually clicking through you can see for example,
if they get confused.
You can tell more or less how long it will take them to do a specific task,
so you get kind of these more specific visibility metrics.