Rapid Prototyping Tools and Principles

Dan Harrelson from Adaptive Path has writ­ten a very inter­est­ing blog post titled Rapid Prototyping Tools and what makes good pro­to­types. My long time favorite Adobe Fireworks is men­tionned along with Axure RP Pro (which is a newer tool in my arse­nal) but also sev­eral oth­ers includ­ing online tools like Balsamiq Mockups.

What is most inter­est­ing to me in the post is the first part before he lists the tools and where he explains the prin­ci­ples of good pro­to­typ­ing and why it should be done in the first place. For me, this comes fol­low­ing a very well received pre­sen­taion at the IA Summint 2009 from Fred Beecher titled Integrating Effective Prototyping Into Your Design Process and which I fol­lowed through live tweet­ing as I couldn’t attend.

Both Harrelson and Beecher press the impor­tant point that cre­at­ing inter­ac­tive pro­to­types helps us design bet­ter user expe­ri­ences as they help val­i­date a design direc­tion early in the process before invest­ing a lot of money and effort into design or devel­op­ment solu­tions that may not yield the best results possible.

I strongly sug­gest you take a look at Dan Harrelson’s blog post and go through Fred’s pre­sen­ta­tion slides. They may put you on a track to improve your own process and deliver bet­ter solu­tions to your clients.