Build the First Walkthrough With Paper Cards

Put six blank cards on a table. Give yourself a pencil and choose one small task for a fictional product: borrowing a book from a neighbourhood shelf, perhaps, or signing up for a workshop. For this exercise, the product does not need a name, a colour palette, or an impressive opening screen.

It needs a person trying to do something. Write that person’s immediate aim at the top of a separate sheet. “I want to reserve a place at Saturday’s pottery workshop” is enough. Avoid inventing an elaborate personal history. A clear aim and a relevant circumstance will give the walkthrough something practical to follow.

On the first card, sketch what the person sees at the start. Use rectangles, labels, and rough text. In this hypothetical workshop example, the card might show the date, location, available places, and a button labelled “Reserve a place.” The point is to represent a decision, not to produce a miniature finished interface.

Ask someone to play the person using the product, or take that role yourself with deliberate care. Read only what is on the card. What would you do next? If the answer depends on information that exists only in the designer’s head, write the missing information down. That gap is a useful result of the exercise.

When the person chooses an action, place the next card in front of them. Perhaps it asks for a name and contact address. Keep the other cards out of view so the participant encounters the proposed experience in sequence. Seeing the whole arrangement at once can make an unclear step seem obvious because the answer is visible further along.

Narrate the system’s response only when the card cannot reasonably show it. You might say, “The reservation is now being checked,” then reveal a waiting card. Avoid explaining why the design is sensible while someone uses it. Every explanation repairs the experience temporarily and makes it harder to see what the design itself communicates.

Continue until the person reaches a meaningful ending. A generic “Success!” card is rarely enough. In the workshop example, the final card should say which session was reserved and what happens next. The participant should be able to explain the outcome without relying on the person holding the pencil.

Then introduce one complication. Suppose the last place becomes unavailable before the reservation finishes. Make a card for that situation. What does the person learn? Can they choose another session? Have their details been kept? A simple paper exercise becomes more useful when it includes a plausible interruption rather than following only the easiest route.

Use the back of each card for observations. Write what happened, rather than immediately recording a solution. “Looked for the location before choosing a date” preserves the behaviour. “Make the location red” jumps to a design decision that may or may not address it. You can choose a solution after understanding the difficulty.

The cards should remain cheap to change. Cross out a heading, split one card into two, or remove a step entirely. If you find yourself carefully redrawing every rectangle, return to rough marks. The freedom to rearrange the sequence is the reason for using separate pieces of paper in the first place.

This exercise has limits. Paper cannot tell you whether a real interface will feel responsive, whether controls will be accessible, or whether the system can perform the promised actions. It also does not prove that people want the product. It helps you inspect a proposed sequence before investing more effort in its presentation and implementation.

End by laying the cards out in order and telling the story in plain language. Where does the person begin? What decisions do they make? What can interrupt them? How do they know they have finished? Any answer that still needs a long explanation deserves another pass. The paper has done its job when the next design question becomes smaller, clearer, and easier to work on.

Keep the discarded cards nearby until the exercise ends. Sometimes a removed step contained an important explanation that still belongs elsewhere. Looking back briefly can help you preserve that information while keeping the simpler sequence you have just discovered.