Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

Interactive Prototypes
In making the first type, once again I suggest that you start with quick and dirty versions,
get feedback from your team about them, and do user testing with them early on. It used to
be that developers had to make prototypes, because designers didn’t know how to
program, and many designers still don’t. But many prototyping tools have now been
developed that allow anyone to begin making interactive prototypes in a snap.
I strongly recommend that you follow the practice of rapid prototyping, testing
several versions of rough prototypes of smaller units of your design, rather than starting
with a full prototype. I often begin my prototyping by creating a testable version of just a
single interaction. I again start with the core, with the most commonly performed
interactions. Beginning this way, just for yourself at first, almost always helps you
discover changes you want to make before anyone else is involved at all. But such rough
prototypes have also proven extremely helpful to me in getting feedback early enough
from my team and from users. I’ve gotten some pushback from product managers on user
tests that don’t include visual design, because they think users won’t really understand the
look and feel of a product, but the alternatives of either not testing or waiting for visual
design before testing can mean mistakes and time wasted on corrections. To contend with
the issue that the prototypes are so rough, I recommend stressing to your test subjects and
your team that the prototypes are not indicative of the final visuals or performance of the
product, and limiting them to testing of particular parts of your designs, rather than getting
an overall assessment of a product. So, for example, you can use the rough prototypes to
test how people rank three different navigations from your home page to a few of the next
screens they could progress to.
A screenshot of Tumult Hype and a prototype. The lower portion of the software shows
animations on a timeline. Using Hype you can trigger animations, like transitions, by
assigning actions to the UI elements in the upper stage portion.
A number of tools for fast and rough prototyping are now on the market. One of
them, an iOS app called POP (for Prototyping on Paper) lets you take photos of your
sketches and string them together, allowing you to prototype with only pen, paper, and an
iPhone. Other tools for easy prototyping exist, such as InVision, Axure, and Flinto, but the