Code: Prototyping

A prototype is a primitive representation or version of a product that a design team or front-end-development team typically creates during the design process. The goal of a prototype is to test the flow of a design solution and gather feedback on it—from both internal and external parties—before constructing the final product. The state of a prototype is fluid as the team revises the design iteratively based on user feedback.

Why Are Prototypes Important?

Tom and David Kelley of the design company IDEO have perfectly summed up the importance of prototyping by saying:

“If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a prototype is worth 1,000 meetings.” Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts discusses how they capture and categorize information that comes from many different sources for easy access later on.

The Internet provides so much information that we can drown in it! Professionals in cutting-edge fields like user experience must stay up to date with the most recent advances in their fields. While having easy access to all of this information on the Internet is great, it can also be overwhelming! How can we organize this large volume of information so it’s useful to us?

Each month in Ask UXmatters, our experts provide answers to our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: [email protected]. Read More

Wireframing and prototyping are two of the most important stages of the design process. Wireframes and prototypes enable you to present your design concepts and show a Web site’s or application’s basic functionality to your stakeholders and clients. It is important that your clients understand the significance of creating wireframes and prototypes for their overall project and the differences between these deliverables.

At one of my previous organizations, our design team was redesigning an ecommerce Web site. During a daily standup meeting, our client suggested that we skip the prototyping stage and, instead, start with front-end development, creating interactive screens with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Angular JS. This meant our team needed to design what the site was actually going to look like, as well as its functionality, in actual code. Read More