Something interactive will almost always communicate more than a picture ever could, and you’ll have better conversations because of it. On the other hand, Sketch is an excellent UI design tool, lightweight and quite powerful, and it works great with Flinto, InVision and the like because they live in the borderlands of flat images and HTML or native code. In this article, Joshua Mauldin will talk you through why you should prototype and how you can do it with Sketch and prototyping tools such as Flinto and InVision. He’ll also get a nicely documented freebie Sketch file to help you.
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For many of us, the idea of doing formal user testing, is a formidable challenge. There are many reasons why: you don’t have enough lead time; you can’t find enough participants, or the right type of participant; you can’t convince your boss to spend the money. User testing is the best way to improve your designs. If you rely on anecdotal data, or your own experience, you can’t design a great solution to your user’s problems. User testing is vital. But how do you make the case for it and actually do it?
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Low-fidelity prototypes are rough representations of concepts that help us to validate those concepts early on in the design process. Throughout this article, Laura Busche will look at some of the features that make low-fidelity prototyping a unique tool to radically improve your work and to build an environment in which users’ needs can be truly realized. This article focuses on the practice and general principles behind integrating low-fidelity prototypes in design in general, covering applications that range from graphic, web and user experience design to business and service design.
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Dammed up inside our heads are creative waterfalls of fresh interactions, transitions, and animations. But how are we supposed to communicate them to our teams, our developers? How do we get them out of our heads? Through a game of charades? Not being able to “show” the interactions and animations that bring our designs to life is one of the common struggles plaguing our industry. Exacerbating the urgency of this challenge is the simple fact that we now design for screens that can be tapped, pinched, swiped, zoomed, and more.
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Understanding people better often requires us to get outside and get our hands dirty but, in doing so, allows us to better analyze and solve. In the first of three articles, Pete Smart will share what travelling from the bustling metropolis of London to the cobbled backstreets of Turin taught me about the design process and about the power of empathy to foster innovation.
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Popular programs are out there, but many of them have considerable drawbacks, which has led Shalom Goltz to explore alternative apps. As you will soon see, InDesign has a unique set of tools and features that are perfectly suited to designing wireframes and interactive prototypes in a more intuitive way than you ever thought possible.
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There are many ways to create wireframes, click-throughs and prototypes. In the end, what matters is that the process of creation is fast and accurate and that the output is of a high enough fidelity to generate the appropriate level of feedback.
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After following the steps in Part 1, we now have everything to start building the prototype. But first, Shlomo explains how to create a “live” iOS prototype.
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Did you know that you can use Fireworks in combination with other tools to create complex iOS prototypes (for both the iPhone and iPad) with similar ease?
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Axure enables you to quickly create a prototype for a mobile app or website, with no investment in development. In this article, Will Hacker goes through some of the capabilities of Axure by showing how he used Axure RP 6.5 to prototype a theoretical iPhone app for the Chicago chapter of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).
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