Paper Prototyping in a Model-Driven Process for Android Application Simulation Support

The current demand for apps has greatly moved the software development market. Due their massive distribution and use by thousands of different users, special attention needs to be paid to the interfaces design and the ways of interaction with these apps. An efficient way to evaluate these aspects in advance is prototyping. However, prototyping is often overlooked because of the additional cost it has put into the app development process and the time that may require it. The aim of this paper is to present a prototyping process for apps based on the paper construction of interface drafts and their interactions. Later these drafts are captured by the camera of a smartphone, generating a version of the app that can be used by the client to evaluate the interactions. This process also generates a digital version of the project based on a Domain Specific Language (DSL), whereby this prototype can be refined, generating, if necessary, a new executable version for evaluation or a new paper model to be presented and modified by the client. The validation of the proposal is done through a case study, in which an application is modeled on paper through a stencil for Android interface. Thus, generating the digital version of the project as well as the codes that implement the screens and the navigation structures between them.