Paper Prototyping Redesigned

In 2010 I was promoted to Head of Design at Grupa Nokaut. Young and full of energy, I kept challenging myself to do more — including design work for a series of early-stage startups. Not a single one succeeded.

That summer I decided to reflect on those failures and engage in a fun little project answering a problem I felt myself. Little did I know this side project would shape the next ten years of my life.

Grupa Nokaut was a highly engineering-driven organization. Design was appreciated after some successful experiments, but collaboration remained a problem — design and engineering lived in two silos.

So I started running paper prototyping workshops, inviting the entire engineering team to review research together and sketch solutions in small interdisciplinary groups. The first one was only somewhat successful: people were engaged, but many struggled with sketching and felt self-conscious about expressing themselves visually.

For the next edition, instead of blank paper and pencils, the team received sticky notes printed with the essential components from our style guide. Instead of sketching, they assembled interfaces. That playful approach worked — and with two friends I turned it into a product.

Create a collaborative tool for designers and engineers. Build a go-to-market plan that strongly resonates with the target audience and launch on November 11th, 2010. And sell 400 notepads within 30 days of launch.

With my co-founders I started by defining a small set of interface elements — today we would call them atoms — universal enough to build any website. For hours we cut shapes out of sticky notes and tried to recreate eBay, Facebook, MySpace.

Once we had a set that worked, we tested it with designer friends. After dozens of iterations we had something that held up in most cases. Then we went looking for a printing house, and learned that producing sticky notes in unusual shapes with sufficiently strong glue is genuinely hard. Two months of negotiation later, we had our first series: 400 pieces.

In early November the printing house delivered. In theory we were ready. In practice we still had to build the UXPin website and store.

To force the issue we fixed the launch date: November 11th — simultaneously World Usability Day and Poland Independence Day. It seemed like a great day to launch UXPin.

We were busy with other commitments right up until launch day and had finished nearly nothing. Instead of rescheduling, we worked 24 hours non-stop. The entire website was designed and built in one day, with significant compromises — WordPress served as our eCommerce platform. A price worth paying for keeping our word.

Late in the evening of November 11th we launched. The first order came a few minutes later. We were completely sold out within 48 hours.

UXPin became extremely popular almost immediately. In the first month alone we were serving IBM, Apple, Google, MySpace and Sony.

Within 12 months this very simple notepad led us to starting a real company — one that attracted multiple awards, became the first Polish company to raise capital in Silicon Valley, and today serves tens of thousands of companies all over the world.