[1wu]

Hi Jason,

I'm familiar with the academic research in paper prototyping (for background, I have a Ph.D. in CS [HCI], have been a HCI course assistant, and published in academic HCI/design conferences).

To say that paper prototyping is the best implies a certain design philosophy, team structure, and organizational culture. It requires a certain buy-in, level of trust, and design pace that are not appropriate for all industries. There are reasons why most professional UI/UX design tools go to the pixel level, and why sketching interfaces never took off in practice.

That said, there are great benefits to paper, prototyping, and sketching skills. But there are also drawbacks which are not immediately obvious in reading the research literature or taking academic HCI classes.

[jasonhong]

(Yeah, slow response on my side, end of semester here)

Yes, you're right that it does suggest a certain kind of corporate culture and mindset. A common big challenge with UX is educating the rest of your company about best practices, and most importantly, demonstrating results.

Convincing (say) skeptical engineers of the value of user studies can be hard. A common technique is showing videos of user studies and people failing to use the product. Another common technique is to bring an engineer to a site visit and get first hand experience of the pain points.