WH AT I’ LL S AY What a prototype is. Why prototyping is a good thing to do. Mapping the prototyping landscape. A tour round that landscape. Lots of time for questions, help, and chat.
ITIO N Something to test, explore, and communicate design ideas for a thing which we’re designing. Something: a lower fidelity representation. Could be a paper sketch, wireframe-like clickable prototype, or a fully interactive implementation. A thing: something we’re designing. A website, web app, native app, system, or a process.
Communicate our design ideas in a more powerful and engaging way. Engage stakeholders. Bring users into our design process: research, collaboration, testing. Save time and money.
S C A P E IS B I G ! Lots of tools. Lots of techniques. Lots of folk have attempted to classify prototyping tools: typically by fidelity, complexity / speed of tool, or some combination of these.
IN G B Y F I D E L I T Y More than just visual design quality: level of complexity; breadth and/or depth being presented; richness of interactions. Easy to conflate fidelity with complexity and speed of prototyping. They don’t always correlate. Many tools operate across a range of fidelities.
IN G B Y P R O T O T Y P I NG TO OL C OMPLE X ITY Learning curve, speed of prototype creation, and complexity sometimes correlate, sometimes don’t. Different tools suit different designers and teams. Some tools are quicker to get going with if you’re already creating design deliverables of some kind (e.g. sketches, mockups in Sketch or Photoshop).
D OF P R O T O T Y P E C R E AT I O N / L EA RN IN G CU R VE Paper Marvel PDFs InVision Keynote / PowerPoint Balsamiq OmniGraffle Axure Adobe XD HTML Easy / quick / shallow Medium Hard / slow / steep
R O T O T Y P E T O D O Paper Marvel PDFs InVision Keynote / PowerPoint Balsamiq OmniGraffle Axure Adobe XD HTML Rapidly generate design ideas for interfaces and user flow and explore them Design and present simple structures and layouts Design and present more complex content structures and / or lengthy, involved user journeys
working rapidly and collaboratively; generating ideas; testing and iterating. Anyone can get involved. Quickly becomes impractical to prototype and test a large site. Not easy to share and present prototypes.
P E S FR O M D E SI G NS Can take any existing design deliverables, including simple sketches, and turn them into clickable prototypes quickly and easily. Clickable prototypes can be created with existing tools for creating / editing PDFs. Tools like InVision and Marvel bring a wide range of features specifically to aid prototyping workflow.
C RE AT I NG P R O T O T Y P E S Wide range of tools to suit those prototyping across a range of design and development experience. From Keynote / Powerpoint through to Axure and Adobe XD. Some tools can be used to prototype larger sites; with real data and content; and complex interactions. A wide range of fidelities available across the various tools.
responsive prototyping. Good for building structural prototypes across the breadth and / or depth of a full site structure. Can prototype interactions to whatever depth you wish. A wide range of frameworks and tools. With hosting and workflow sorted, sharing is ‘easy’. Potentially steep learning curve, or work with developers!
TOOLS Too many to list! Always changing: old tools die or get bought, new tools arriving all the time. Think about tools in terms of our categories (and maybe your own too). Then as tools come and go, you can get a feel for which ones will be useful to you.
D OF P R O T O T Y P E C R E AT I O N / L EA RN IN G CU R VE Paper Marvel PDFs InVision Keynote / PowerPoint Balsamiq OmniGraffle Axure Adobe XD HTML Easy / quick / shallow Medium Hard / slow / steep
R O T O T Y P E T O D O Paper Marvel PDFs InVision Keynote / PowerPoint Balsamiq OmniGraffle Axure Adobe XD HTML Rapidly generate design ideas for interfaces and user flow and explore them Design and present simple structures and layouts Design and present more complex content structures and / or lengthy, involved user journeys
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