Prototyping is essential to help your team create the best product possible. It’s a chance to experiment with ideas and turn them into something tangible that you can test and build upon. When you fail with your prototype, you land softly — there’s always the chance to iterate and improve.
The team behind Adobe’s new prototyping tool Experience Design (Adobe XD) uses prototyping as a method to test new features before they make it into the program. Being a product manager on the Adobe XD team, I’ll share some insights into how the team uses prototyping to build and improve Adobe XD, and make prototyping more efficient for designers.
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Behind every great invention lie dozens of sacrificed prototypes. It took Michele Ferrero almost five years to perfect the spherical wafer within the famous chocolates that bear his name. No great product or invention emerges fully formed, and this applies to great websites and software as well. Whether you’re working on digital products or chocolates, prototyping plays an important role in any successful project.
If you work in user experience or software development, chances are you will have encountered Axure RP at some point. Launched in 2003, Axure has gained a loyal following within the UX community. It allows for the creation of rich, functional prototypes without writing a single line of code.
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Prototyping tools have become an important resource for us designers — allowing us to document multiple states of a single screen, including animations, transitions and microinteractions that are hard to represent in static documentation.
Companies that pay attention to this trend have started to build prototyping tools to address this need; and today we’re seeing a plethora of tools emerge on a regular basis. But which should you pick? More importantly, what questions should you ask yourself and your team to make sure you choose the right one?
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Content is the core commodity of the digital economy. It is the gold we fashion into luxury experience, the diamond we encase in loyalty programs and upsells. Yet, as designers, we often plug it in after the fact. We prototype our interaction and visual design to exhaustion, but accept that the “real words” can just be dropped in later. There is a better way.
More and more, the digital goods we create operate within a dynamic system of content, functionality, code and intent. Our products and services drift and spill into partner websites, social media feeds and myriad electronic aggregators, all seeking to shape visitor behavior and understanding. Systems build on systems, and, in short order, we’ve cobbled together a colossus the breadth of which sends minds a-boggling.
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Years ago, a kid was trying to fashion a bow by cutting a twig with a knife. Upon seeing this struggle, his grandfather handed him a saw, saying, “Always use the right tool for the job!” As the kid in the story, I learned a valuable lesson in craftsmanship: When you’re picking a tool to solve a problem, there are many good tools, but some are better suited to the task than others!
In recent years, new prototyping tools have emerged, many for mobile design. The landscape is constantly changing, with some tools losing favor with UX designers (or UXers) and others taking their place. While this article will not serve as a complete paint-by-numbers manual for selecting a prototyping tool, we will discuss important factors that influence the selection process.
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Product teams in startups and mid-sized and large companies are all implementing usability testing and prototyping as a way to de-risk product development. As the focus shifts from engineering to prototyping, it is becoming increasingly important for anyone who creates prototypes to understand the differences between a prototype and a product build.
By optimizing the prototyping process, you can produce mockups that deliver the most actionable user insights, while being as efficient as possible with design time. Regardless of which prototype tools you use or whether you test wireframes, clickable mockups or coded prototypes, what’s most important to focus on is what you want to test and what you want to learn from it.
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Prototyping is one of the best things that can happen within a project, yet it is extremely underutilized. Prototyping makes a project better suited to users, elevates user experience, increases the quality of your final code, and keeps clients happy.
The problem is that developers often see prototyping as a waste of time, since high-quality prototypes take considerable effort to make. I want to show you that by using WordPress, highly interactive prototypes with great visuals are not at all that difficult to make.
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If you’re a member of the web or UI design community, it’s been hard to avoid talking about Sketch over the last year. The launch of this design app shook up an industry dominated by Adobe for more than two decades, and it has caused an ongoing debate about whether Sketch is better than Photoshop and Illustrator (and Fireworks).
A longtime Photoshop user myself, I made the switch to Sketch in early 2014 and haven’t looked back. I love certain features of the program, such as the simple interface, file autosave and infinite canvas. However, plenty of other programs out there have similar features, and until the most recent update (Sketch 3.2), users were battling a lot of bugs in the app.
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The navigation system is often the most important and complex user interface component of modern websites. In recent years, small screens, responsive website techniques and ever-evolving hardware and software have only added to this complexity.
A quick query of “mobile navigation” returns thousands of opinions on navigation patterns, including the “hamburger” menu, front-end plugins, frameworks and plenty of other tools. Despite this changing landscape of tools and design trends, a successful navigation system sends users on the path to the exact content they need at the right time.
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Most of us were thrown for a loop when responsive design came into being. We tried to jam it into our existing, pixel-perfect, old-as-the-web-itself processes. It’s been a steep learning curve (and still is). In my previous article “Next-Generation Responsive Web Design Tools: Webflow, Edge Reflow, Macaw” for Smashing Magazine, I didn’t have enough space to dive as deep into those tools, as I wanted. So, in this article, I’m going to dive deep into just one of those tools: Adobe Edge Reflow CC.
Edge Reflow is one in an avalanche of tools that have come out that make it possible to visually design a responsive website. What you do with that design is up to you (and the capabilities of the tool). Edge Reflow was created to address how responsive design has changed our web workflows.
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