When it comes to designing a great interface for an app, website or other tool, User Experience (UX) should be at the center of everything you do. But how do you know if your navigation, display and page organization offer a smooth and easy to use experience? Naturally, designers know their designs inside out, but do they make any sense to end users? Prototypes offer the middle ground here, providing a way of gauging the effectiveness of your design.

 

Prototypes help developers and designers explore their ideas before they write a line of code, allowing them to test these with stakeholders and their target audience. Prototypes allow you to:

 

• Experience the content and interactions of an interface

 

• Learn how the product may feel in the hands of the user

 

• Get a cost-effective method of understanding and developing your product

 

No developer wants to spend hours meticulously editing their code and building a product just for it to get sent back to the drawing board because of an unforeseen usability error.

 

The static nature of wireframing and visual mockups offers a useful way of understanding how a user interface may look on screen, but there will always be question marks until you can physically interact with what you’ve created. Prototyping allows this, without taking up precious time and often without having to write a single line of code.

 

In this post we will look at what prototypes are and what they are not.

 

Prototype styles

 

A step-by-step or iterative development process allows for consistent testing of the feasibility and usability of a product. This offers a great way for discovering which areas might need some tweaking, especially given how much has to be considered when creating an effective UX. Prototyping allows for multiple iterations at any level of fidelity to be made in a relatively short space of time.  

 

There are two different ways of to approach prototyping: Paper and Click-through

 

• Paper prototyping gives you the ability to transfer straight from your initial design to pen and paper sketches, meaning the only limit to creativity is your imagination
• Click-through prototypes are a little more complicated and let you design a range of screens using a computer based prototyping platform. While more time consuming, click through prototypes give you the benefits of interactivity

 

Paper prototyping allows you to make constant improvements and alterations easily, while click-through offers a more accurate representation of the finished product. Of course, you are not limited to just one of these methods, and trying out both will let you see which is best suited for you and your product.

 

It’s also worth deciding on the fidelity of your prototype - low-fidelity, high-fidelity, or somewhere in between. High-fidelity lets you focus on perfecting the visual design, whereas low-fidelity takes less time and effort to build, and as such is more suited to practicing the interaction flows and general feel of your product.

 

 

Prototype faster than ever

 

Thanks to the consumerization of IT, clients expect high quality experiences to be delivered rapidly, often without understanding just how complicated it is to build an app. Time is precious and budgets are often tight. Prototypes aim to give you a good idea of how smoothly your product looks and feels without having to tear your hair out over all the improvements you need to make along the way. However, in today’s market customers expect things faster, better and at a lower cost than ever before. Indigo Studio lets you create prototypes without writing a single line of code and gets you closer to that final product so much faster.

 

With an unparalleled focus on UX, and a new online share feature which allows colleagues to test and explore your designs without having to open Indigo Studio, letting you work collaboratively with ease. Indigo Studio provides smooth screen-to-screen animations that support touch gestures and the ability to design native experiences for iPhone and iPad with the iOS Platform Pack.

 

It is always worth remembering that a prototype is never the finished product. There will always be dissimilarities between the prototype and your final product in terms of look and feel. That said, there is no doubt that when it does come to release, prototyping will have given you a more accurate and complete idea of what your product is there to do and who it’s for. Now all that’s left to do is go out there and get creative.