Prototyping is Like An Onion – It Has Layers

Recently, I’ve had to create several in-depth interactive prototypes, and keeping all the various designs and interactions straight was a bit of a daunting task. Especially when the level of interactive fidelity was high. To ensure that I hooked up every piece of interaction and wrote every logic case needed, I took the development of the prototypes step by step, or layer by interactive layer. This post is  a brief description of the process I followed. I’d be interested to know how this relates to your own process and any other comments you might have.

Advanced Prototyping Using Blend 3

The key to any advanced prototypes using Blend 3 w/ Skecthflow is using the SketchFlow Animation Panel, the more advanced States panel, or by adding common interactive behavior to controls. Now, if you happen to have any Flash background, setting up animations will feel very comfortable for you. Below are my thoughts on how to set up some of the behavior that is exhibited by another Silverlight Prototype I put together. (Please explore the prototype to see how feedback and annotations work.)

Prototyping with Blend 3 and Sketchflow

My first introduction to Blend wasn’t a pleasant one, so bad that when Blend2 came out I promptly ignored it. However, while attending the Day of .Net Conference I sat in on a demo of Blend 3 with Sketchflow. It was impressive to see the improvement that has been made in the Blend, and with the addition of Sketchflow.  To dive deep into the capabilities of Blend, I downloaded the trial version and set out to create a prototype for a future design of this blog (and do some R&D for how to use this on my project team). Below are some thoughts I had while cranking out this concept.

Links 7/1 – 7/10

Seeing Things Differently – It is always best to keep in mind the people that always need a little help.

Designing A Unified Experience – Kim Goodwin gives an outstanding overview of design. Great video to check out.

Todd Zaki Warfel – redUX DC ‘09 – Todd gives us a great run down of the workshop he gave on prototyping at the IA Summit back in March.

Links for 4/27 – 5/1

You Can’t NOT Afford Good User Experience -  Great resource for anyone looking for ammo to sell UX internally. Stated so simply it is amazing that some people still don’t get it.

IA Summit 2009: Effective Prototyping

If there was a best of show award given at the IA Summit, Fred Beecher’s (twitter) track on prototyping would be one of the nominees. Jonathan Knoll (twitter) summed it up best by stating ‘@fred_beecher’s prototyping session is turning into the most directly educational & practical I’ve seen in a long time.’ Below are my tweets from the presentation: