JOEL ON SOFTWARE: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity
by Joel Spolsky
thirteenPAPER PROTOTYPING
FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2003
Years ago, the Excel team was trying to figure out if it would be a good idea to allow users to drag and drop cells using the mouse. They had a couple of interns "whip up a prototype" suitable for usability testing, using the cutting-edge Visual Basic 1.0. Building the prototype took all summer, because it had to duplicate so much of Excel's real functionality or you couldn't do a real usability test.
The conclusion of usability testing? Yes, it was a good feature! The programmer in charge spent maybe a week and completely implemented the drag-and-drop feature. The joke is, of course, that the whole point of creating a prototype is to "save time."
A year later, another top-secret Microsoft team ...
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