User Interface Prototyping as a Quality Improvements Tool

The quality of any products or service depends largely on how well it meets customer needs. Defining new feature that meet customer needs require accurate identification of those needs and unambiguous specification of the feature requirements for the development team. In designing the user interface for a graphics workstation-based network management system (the ACCUMASTER (R) Integrator) we have found that prototyping the user interface is instrumental in both identifying customer needs and communicating them to development.