Practical Prototyping Tips

I saw Todd Warfel speak in August at DELVE UI. I was so inspired by his approach that I changed the way we work. We have now moved away from large decks of wireframes and interaction notes- and embraced the 70% rule. We design 70% then build a prototype. There are a number of examples in my talk Designers vs Developers: Coming together to build the best RIAs. But the point is, if you are designing Rich Internet Applications, RIAs, prototyping is essential.

Check out Todd’s talk on prototyping:

And consider getting his new book, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide to Prototyping, Rosenfeld Media, November 2009. It is full of practical advice and detailed examples, not philosophical musings. If you are like me- a busy consultant who is not a great programmer, but needs to get interactive mock-ups in front of stakeholders as fast as possible- there are a number of great ideas in here.

11 Comments

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  5. Alexandre Plennevaux Said,

    November 28, 2009 @ 12:18 pm

    Could you elaborate a bit more on this 70% rule?

  6. Theresa Neil Said,

    November 28, 2009 @ 4:40 pm

    What I have been doing personally is sketching out just enough to communicate the vision, and get the stakeholder (and user group) buy-in. This can be done with Balsamiq Mockups or any other low fidelity mock up tool for a small product, or in a bit more detail for larger productivity applications (I still use OmniGraffle for most of my wireframes).

    My personal goal is to get away from delivering a stack of wireframes with interaction notes, and instead deliver a prototype with the interactions built in. So as soon as we get consensus on the design direction (the application structure and all the rough screen layouts), we switch to the prototype to fill in the details. To date- this is saving our clients money – in design, development and QA testing.

  7. piotr Said,

    December 13, 2009 @ 2:38 am

    Really great post and presentation

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    December 29, 2009 @ 1:09 pm

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    February 13, 2010 @ 3:00 am

    I understood a bit but its a great mock up tool and helps to understand the things easily.

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