Expert habits vs. UI improvements: re-design of a room booking system

This paper presents the results of a case study examining prototyping as a method in re-designing a user interface (UI). In the case presented, a web-based room booking was re-designed. Running on a university web site, the existing system has caused much critique amongst its users. Their expectations for a new UI were increased ease of use, less effort required, and less time consumed. We prototyped a new UI using Visio and tested it with a small number of experienced and novice users. Our results partly favor the existing system and partly the new one. To our surprise, experienced users performed relatively poorer with the new UI considering their critique of the existing one. We found paper prototyping to be an efficient method to gain user feedback on usability issues and that a low-fidelity prototype does not automatically mean low-effort testing. We observed that visible-state UI elements can be demanding to test through paper prototyping.