Your prototype is finished—now what? The way you share your prototypes with others and present them will determine the effectiveness of your designs and the impact they will have. Excel has many features that can help you effectively share your prototypes with other stakeholders. The process of sharing your design to achieve buy-in from the various stakeholders includes three important activities:

Rarely is a prototype the product of a single person's effort. Often many people play roles in the design process. They all have some ownership of the iterations of prototypes that go into creating software. An early prototype might begin as a product manager's idea, but during the course of the design and implementation process, others will contribute their expertise and ideas. In today's world of global software creation, the people who participate in any prototyping activity might not even be on the same continent.

We have participated in many workshops in which we brainstormed on software designs by opening an Excel prototyping template and beginning to visualize ideas. Someone will start with an idea for a design. We create the designs without spending time to make them look pixel-perfect, because Excel nearly automatically handles alignments and styles. The prototypes are clear enough for everyone to understand the ideas behind them. If some members of the design team are not available in the same physical space, we share the Excel files over the Internet by using meeting applications such as WebEx. Sometimes a participant tries to contribute an idea but cannot explain it adequately, either because English is not his first language or because he speaks a specialized domain language that not everyone understands. In such cases, we hand over the Excel file to that person, who can quickly show us in Excel what he is thinking. This way, when people are creating a real-time prototype, misunderstandings and mismatches in expectations are immediately identified.

Excel can be an even more powerful tool to help clarify competing visions and conceptual misunderstandings. When you create a prototype and distribute it to stakeholders, the feedback you receive will immediately show you whether you have hit the mark or not. With Excel, the advantage is that design team members can annotate or correct designs by directly changing the Excel files. This eliminates the dependency on a single gatekeeper prototyper or being limited to a prototyping tool that few participants know. Moreover, sharing Excel prototypes levels the playing field so everyone can contribute. People who are more visually oriented and less articulate in meetings are empowered to visualize their ideas.

Another form of collaboration is to have your prototype evaluated by internal stakeholders and objective external reviewers. Just as with other prototypes, Excel prototypes can be evaluated. For example, cognitive walkthroughs or interactive demos are among the methods that can be used in the different evaluation settings, such as usability testing, focus groups, and participatory design sessions. Whatever the evaluation or review techniques, it is important to avoid any potential risks with Excel prototypes.

Why is sharing the results of a prototype the riskiest step in the prototyping process? What happens after you've finished your prototype can be unpredictable for four reasons:

How do you mitigate these risks by prototyping in Excel?

Your presentation should include a roadmap from the current design instantiation to the final design to be implemented. Be sure to share the Excel prototype with all your product stakeholders and go over the various design and requirements details with them before the presentation. The Excel prototype can either be shared during a meeting, where you can interactively work on it with your stakeholders, or distributed so that they can mark it up and return it to you.

Be sure that the design concepts of a prototype can be implemented by socializing your designs with the engineering team. What seemed to be possible in the beginning of a project might no longer be possible just weeks before code freeze—and definitely not possible during system testing. Again, solutions to issues found as a result of evaluation need to be reviewed carefully and signed off by the product stakeholders to assure they can be implemented.

A simple process rule suggests that you never let any of the members of your product team prototype in isolation or diverge from the agreed-on product design plan. Assure that all prototyping activities are included in the project plan, even those by developers used for proof of concepts. These proof-of-concept prototypes can often undermine your design efforts by introducing conflicting design ideas that are orthogonal to the overall agreed-on design direction. In a presentation, everyone in development involved in prototyping should be present and actively participating. Include all stakeholders at your presentations and design reviews.

Archive outdated prototypes from project servers, project folders, and so on. Ensure that anyone who has seen the older versions of the prototype knows that a new one supersedes previous versions. Meet with stakeholders to inform them of and discuss the differences, and leave nothing to chance.

During a prototype presentation, provide a schedule of the future updates and other prototyping activities such as future validation testing, reiterations, and so on. Outline the types of changes that are anticipated. Early in the design process there could be conceptual changes, so developing to early conceptual prototypes is very risky. Later in the product design process, when no major changes are expected, developing to a more refined prototype is less risky—as long you allow for last-minute changes and refinements. Set everyone's expectations for the possibility of changes ahead.

After an evaluation takes place, the prototype is out of date. Planning of the evaluation activities must be clearly communicated to everyone. Published results should be made available to everyone and whenever possible integrated into the prototype.

You can integrate results into an Excel prototype in five ways:

During a presentation, the moment can come when it seems that magic happens: Everything seems logical and intuitive. This is usually because someone is narrating a preconceived scenario to fit the design that was created. As long as the scenario is credible, the prototype comes across as effective and brilliant. But what can get lost in such a presentation is what, exactly, one is supposed to learn from the prototype. It might be impossible to distinguish what was temporarily added to support the flow of the scenario from what is the core, agreed-on design direction embodied in the prototype. To avoid any confusion, annotations can be created within Excel to communicate what has been and has not been tested.

The following tips are all designed to help you avoid the risks of sharing a prototype. Prototypes too often get bogged down in details that the product team never intended to demonstrate, but the details are nevertheless employed to help set context. One solution is to reduce the fidelity to mask these distracting details. Sometimes these details are essential to help an audience understand important aspects of a prototype and the conceptual design it represents. Some ways to control what you're trying to communicate with your prototype include

Setting expectations at the onset is essential. It helps to make sure that you adequately address the established requirements and the defined task flow, which are the focal points of the prototype. This can be done verbally in a meeting but can be quickly forgotten. It is much better to give the audience a short summary of these points. If you are distributing your prototype, you can include this summary as a kind of cover worksheet. In the downloadable files on our Effective Prototyping Website, we include a sample summary worksheet that you can copy and modify for your purposes. In addition to a summary, the key design requirements and task flow diagram can be included as worksheets that link to related screen design worksheets.

Modulating degrees of fidelity within and across prototypes can be a powerful means of controlling what users focus on in your prototypes relative to what you are trying to portray and communicate. For example, one method for focusing the user on the right prototype characteristics is to reduce the fidelity of unimportant but contextually helpful characteristics. If you're displaying a wireframe to show a new visual design direction, one way of controlling what the viewer focuses on is to greek the text to prevent the viewer from getting immersed in the editorial content.

Another method for directing the user's attention where you want it is to deemphasize the parts of the design that don't require focus. This method involves toning down the unimportant areas of prototype screens by reducing their opacity; that is, modulating their translucency. For example, you're prototyping a new screen layout for a business application. Two elements in the prototype are two controversial data tables, which are not part of your design. You do not want the conversation to focus on these tables. To avoid that, you can lay a translucent shape over the table to preserve it as part of the larger context but diminish its potential for distraction.

You can provide any of several interaction methods for your prototype:

One recommendation for this type of presentation is to distinguish which links are functional from those that aren't by displaying the functional links in blue (with or without underlines) and the nonfunctional links in black with underlines (Figure 10.9). This is important to signal to the presenter or anyone else using this prototype which links are clickable and which are not (Figure 10.10).

You can modify the Excel application user interface to achieve better visual presentations. To clear out some of the distracting visual screen clutter, start by closing any unneeded toolbars. From the View > Tools menu, deselect any toolbars that are not needed for your presentation (Figure 10.11, page 200).

Choosing Tools > Options > View, you can hide the row and column headers by deselecting that option in the Options dialog box (Figure 10.12, page 200).

Hiding the row and column headers allows your design to take full advantage of the worksheet width and removes extraneous visual elements that might detract from the presentation. In this dialog box you can also deselect the Sheet tabs setting that hides the tabs at the bottom of the worksheet. Although you might not want to hide the tabs if you plan to use them to navigate your presentation, you can still navigate from one worksheet tab to the next via Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn (Figure 10.13, page 201).

Another way to present your Excel prototype designs in a more streamlined and effective way is by saving the workbook as an HTML file and then using that as a presentation artifact. Saving as HTML

To save your prototype as HTML, in the Save As dialog box, select Web Page in the Files of type menu (Figure 10.14 and Figure 10.15).

Good preparation, thorough documentation, and thoughtful presentation and evaluation can ensure buy-in from stakeholders for your design and can make your prototype useful throughout the design and development process. Selective use of presentation devices ensures an effective presentation of your prototype.