Effective Prototyping with Excel: A Practical Handbook for Developers and Designers

Although recognized as a key to the design process, prototyping often falls victim to budget cuts, deadlines, or lack of access to sophisticated tools. This can lead to sloppy and ineffective prototypes or the abandonment of them altogether. Rather than lose this important step, people are turning to Microsoft Excel to create effective, simple, and inexpensive prototypes. Conveniently, the software is available to nearly everyone, and most are proficient in its basic functionality.

Effective Prototyping with Excel offers how-to guidance on how everyone can use basic Excel skills to create prototypes - ranging from narrative wire frames to hi-fidelity prototypes. A wide array of software design problems and business demands are solved via practical step-by-step examples and illustrations.

• Step-by-step guide to prototyping with a simple and affordable tool nearly everyone already has on their desktop.
• Quickly and easily allows web and software designers to explore usability, design alternatives, and test theories prior to starting production.
• Perfect companion to Effective Prototyping for Software Makers - with the same author team and full-color treatment, useful case studies, and hands-on exercises.

About the Authors

Nevin Berger is design director at Ziff Davis Media. Previously he was a senior interaction designer at Oracle Corporation and Peoplesoft, Inc., and has held creative director positions at World Savings and OFOTO, Inc.

Michael Arent is the director of user interface standards at SAP, and has previously held positions at Peoplesoft, Inc, Adobe Systems, Inc, MetaDesign,Sun Microsystems, and Apple Computer, Inc. He holds a number of U.S. and international patents.

Jonathan Arnowitz is a User Experience Architect at Google Inc. and is the co-editor-in-chief of Interactions Magazine. Most recently Jonathan was a User Experience Architect at SAP Labs and was a Senior User Experience Designer at Peoplesoft. He is a member of the SIGCHI extended executive committee, and was a founder of DUX, the first ever joint conference of ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, AIGA Experience Design Group, and STC.

Fred Sampson is an Information Developer for the Content Management and Discovery team at the IBM Silicon Valley Lab, where he helps user experience designers create self-documenting user interfaces. He plans to be an information architect when he grows up. Fred has been a committee member for the DUX (Designing for User Experience) and CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conferences, and contributes regularly to ACM Interactions magazine. Fred is Vice-President for Finance of ACM SIGCHI, a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication, and a member of the Information Architecture Institute and the Usability Professionals Association. He lives on Monterey Bay in California.