![]() Moqups is an HTML5 web app that you can dive right into with little to no introduction. Price: Freemium | More Information moqups This would probably be considered a medium to high fidelity option. This level of organization with so many different people in the creative process taken into account–from designer, to copywriter, to project manager, and client–is what gives it its competitive edge. Jumpchart is designed to organize and facilitate a lot: content, mockups, attachments, architecture, notes and more–all in one place. PowerMockup: $59.95 | More Information jumpchart Powerpoint Price: $6.99/month (min) | More Information Both appear to be extremely quick and easy to use on either desktop or mobile–which is nice for working on the road. For Keynote the one I found (with instructions) is Keynotopia. The advantage to using this approach is that almost everyone will already be familiar with the software so it shouldn’t feel too foreign to them to just dive right in and create including “business types” who may otherwise feel lost in “creative” applications.īoth Keynote and Powerpoint require third party extensions/templates to be used this way. Price: $79 | More Information Keynote/Powerpointīoth Keynote by Apple and Powerpoint by Microsoft can be used to create and share product wireframes and prototypes. For years Balsamiq has been an essential part of the prototyping and development process for a lot of top designers and companies. It also comes with a wide variety of pre-made web/app patterns, icons, screen sizes, and more. They’ve done a great job creating a tool that is as fluid and simple as sketching but much more powerful. ![]() Balsamiq is designed to be a lean and fairly low fidelity wireframing tool–but extremely fast and easy to use. In terms of the tools/techniques featured below, there are without a doubt many more that could have made this list and if your favorite one is not mentioned then I hope you will take a few minutes to share it with us in the comments, along with what you like about it and why others might find it useful too.įirst up, we’ve got balsamiq. Its author gives good advice on brining new prototyping tools and techniques into an existing workflow by adopting the same iterative mentality as prototyping itself. Speaking of which, I’d highly recommend reading the article Prototyping Your Workflow from A List Apart. I didn’t include anything but the above link for UI Stencils for sketching since that one basically takes care of itself–so long as you have pencil and paper.Īs per usual, I haven’t ranked these options in any particular order, merely listed them here for you to see what’s available and choose the option or options that best suit your specific needs. Regardless of which approach you choose to take, one or more of the tools/techniques below should be able help. The programs I’ve collected all allow you to create wireframes and/or working prototypes of varying degrees of fidelity. 10 Rapid Prototyping Programs For Designers From there you can enact a much more meaningful cycle of rapid prototyping and development without getting bogged down in earlier phases. Instead, the idea goes, you can save yourself a lot of time and energy by simply gathering the product requirements and creating something “in browser” or with a high fidelity prototyping tool that looks and feels a lot like the final product you have in mind. Today though, on a device agnostic web, things on the screen are too fluid to adequately be represented in a static format. In the past, most of the end products were fairly static and looked more or less on the screen like they did on the page or in photoshop. In the past several years, especially as responsive design has become the new standard, there has been a large push in the design and development community to go straight to a high fidelity prototype with little to no sketching or wireframing beforehand. The idea being that, in the past, creating sketches and wireframes made a lot more sense than they do now. ![]() A program designed to create a working prototype will provide you with a level of design polish and actual (or mimicked) functionality that will give you a very good idea of what your finished product will be like.
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