Paper prototyping is a low-fidelity design method where you sketch screens, buttons, and interactions by hand on paper to represent an interface before any code is written. Testers "interact" with the paper screens while a facilitator swaps sheets in and out to simulate the app responding to taps and clicks.
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It's one of the fastest and cheapest ways to explore ideas and catch usability problems early, since anyone can sketch, edit, or throw away a paper screen in seconds.

Why does Paper prototyping matter?

Paper prototyping lets teams test the overall flow and layout of a product before investing time in visual design or code. Because changes take seconds instead of hours, it's ideal for the earliest stages of a project, when big structural questions are still up for debate.

For example, a team designing a checkout flow might sketch each screen on index cards and hand them to a user, moving cards aside as the user "taps" buttons, to see whether the steps make sense before building anything digital.

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