Mobile Prototyping — Resources for designers with no coding experiences
High-fidelity prototypes are realistic representations of the final product, and they tend to be very time-intensive to produce. These kinds of prototypes utilize the actual visual design and attempt to replicate the behavior of the final product as closely as possible.
If you’re a designer who is not a huge fan of coding, here are some good news for you — you don’t have to code anymore. I wanted to share some resources that helped to create high-fidelity prototypes along the way. Axure, InVision and Princple are some examples of prototyping tools that can be used to create high-fidelity prototypes.
Scenarios where high-fidelity prototyping comes useful are for conducting usability testing, training users to use the product, communicating the visual design specifications to developers, clients and stakeholders. Furthermore, high-fidelity prototyping can also be used by to visually communicate microinteractions and animations, which can convey an element of delight in their designs. From a timeline perspective, high-fidelity prototyping typically occurs toward the back-half of a project as the designs are being finalized and readied for development. The benefits of producing high-fidelity without coding are to save time for the developers, identifying and reducing the mistakes that occures in the later stages of the development, save profits and resources for your client/company.
Because of the ease with which prototypes can be created, it is now the responsibility of many designers to be able to demonstrate how their designs will work with a prototype. It is a critical skill that digital designers must have in their toolkit.
Here are some resources to make your life easier to design high-quality, convinient and transparent prototypes fot your product/projects:
In Invision, you can create form fields and create interaction elements that mimic their real behavior. Invision is mostly static and is primarily good for click-through and navigation.
There are a multitude of products in the marketplace that allow you to prototype a mobile experience. Principle is different than InVision by its is its capability to create rich, highly interactive prototype.
Self-Evaluation:
- Why do you think it’s important to make prototypes?
- If you had more time or were using a more in depth program, what would be interesting in exploring or changing?
