The main question I have is whether all of the already confident Oncourse users, who got perfectly used to it’s not the most efficient, but still working interface, would be confused and misled by the developed design? In other words, the question is whether the developed design is revolutionary (we invented something new) or evolutional (consistent with the previous design, but improved)?
The paper prototype will definitely help us in this identification, because it is the only way we can test the design and experience it in action. The testing process should be limited in time and involve comparison of both the old fashion Oncourse and the new one. For instance, we can give the user a particular task (such as changing the order of tabs in a predefined order) and have compared the time it takes the user to perform such task on the old Oncourse to the time required to perform the same task on the developed Oncourse (surely we can simulate the new Oncourse in our prototypes). If the person does it in the same amount of time or less, we got perfectly working design that is consistent with previous and it is going to substitute old Oncourse without affecting experienced users. In other case, we have invented something new, which means that both inexperienced and experienced users would become inexperienced and therefore, we have more people that would have to get used to the new design.
