Whats the best way to create interactive application prototypes?
evaluation, prototyping, user-interface
Solution
Real GUI builders are:
- Much slower
- Only programmers can use them (try to explain to analyst how to populate a table in VB)
- They don't let you annotate your mockups on the fly
- Don't have skins (e.g. black&white) to create screens which can't be mistaken for "almost done" application
While specialized mockup tools are usually:
- Communication oriented
- Can print or export your mockups (together with your notes) to PDF/HTML/Word etc
- Better ones have some variant of "master screens" so you can derive hundreds of mockups from only a handful of main application screens (you quickly get to quite a lot of mockups when you try to discuss real scenarios with your client)
- Fast enough so you can prototype realtime in a meeting
Almost a decade ago I got frustrated by all of the above and created my own tool: MockupScreens. It became pretty popular quickly :-)
And here is the most complete list of such specialized tools I know of. Many of those are free: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GuiPrototypingTools
Problem
The question should be interpreted from a general point of view and not targeted solely at web apps or desktop apps. I have been looking around to find a simple and easy way of creating interactive prototypes for web applications. I'd like to use a technique that allows simple UI creation and especially UI recreation and modification in further iterations. Filling the UI with mockup data should be very simple. The technique may require a simple form of programming, e.g. to specify a drag and drop behaviour from UI element A to UI element B. One tool i currently use is the Adobe Flex Builder. The included GUI-designer is very good and i have accomplished some skills with AS3 so far. The problem is adding data to the UI. It always results in me programming code for checking and parsing of XML-trees structures, and mainly debugging this section of the prototype. Too cumbersome! Another tool many people use is PowerPoint which involves a really cumbersome way of creating a GUI by drawing every part of an interaction in a separate slide. No way! I would be much faster with paper prototypes. Other (better!) free form drawing tools are also part of this category (i'm a happy heavy weight inkscape user) but Prototyping and Mockup are obviously not their main purpose. The UI-stencil palette for Viso makes it a bit better than the drawing competition. The main competitors in rapid prototyping as far i know are: - iRise - Axure - Serena and other ? - Viso - Powerpoint, Illustrator, Inkscape or any other free form drawing tool - paper prototyping - IDE with good GUI builders (such as Flex Builder Designer and Netbeans Matisse) My opinion is that real GUI-builders are a good staring point. What are your current approaches? Please outline your process and the pros and cons as an answer here.