Prototyping
Common Types of prototypes
- Low-fidelity (includes paper prototypes)
- Horizontal and vertical prototypes (ways to describe partial prototypes)
- Throw-away prototypes (aka rapid prototypes)
Hartson and Pyla review the tradeoffs of these types of prototypes in chapter 11.
Marc Rettig's article presents advantages of using paper prototypes and how they can be used for testing.
In section 11.6 (chapter 20 in second edition), Hartson and Pyla review many of the techniques that Marc Rettig presents in this article.
Methods and tools for creating prototypes
- Hand drawings
- HTML and Editors
- Task-specific development environments
- Drawing packages
- Visio
- Adobe Illustrator
- Omnigraffle
- Also raster image editors (e.g. Adobe Photoshop)
- Prototyping tools
- Axure
- iRise
- Balsamiq
- Sketch
- Adobe XD
- Figma
Discussion
What are the benefits of prototyping?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the different types of prototypes?