Bryant Street Cafe

I am not an engineer. But I use a lot of applications. I was involved in helping design a workflow for a group inside Sun. To do that, I worked with a methodology called "The Bridge" (for example, http://www.upassoc.org/conferences_and_events/upa_conference/2005/program/activity.php?id=235,) where we gathered a small group of users and engineers to participate in a focussed three-day workshop designing a workflow. The outcome of that process is to have paper prototypes of GUIs which capture the needed functionality. From those paper prototypes one could conduct usability testing. And all of this without any coding. From this effort, one could derive a prioritized set of specifications because one would have derived how the user uses the application. I will say this effort is a hard sell, at least for me. But I would love to hear if others had worked this way on interfaces.Or maybe I don't realize that a lot of work is done this way and since I am not in the engineering community, I am not aware of it.