http://www.iplotz.com is a sweet hosted solution with some basic collaboration tools as well. Works very well for us.
Ask HN: Clickable Prototypes
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: Ask HN: Clickable Prototypes
#12I've been doing just standard HTML mockups, often with some sort of generic stylesheet, so that I don't have to spend much time fiddling with CSS. The things I mock up are typically applications for internal use, this wouldn't work well for client work I would guess.
This works well for a generic stylesheet: http://www.mostinspired.com/blog/2009/01/28/rapid-interactiv...
On the most recent application that I did mockups for, I ended up taking it a step further and building a quick prototype in Rails that I populated with dummy data. Our final development will be in Java, so this is throwaway code, but it was useful for working out how some problems would be solved. I doubt that I would do this for most things, but in this situation it was beneficial.
Re: Ask HN: Clickable Prototypes
#13This is a perennial question amoungst UX/IxD/UI folks. I haven't used Axure and confess to be suspicious of its hype.
My secret weapon is still: paper. I know you said digital, but in my experience all digital prototypes have the inherent weakness of needing a nontrivial investment of time and brainpower JUST TO MANIFEST the thing, to say nothing of making it well designed, or even just coming-out-how-you pictured-it.
I never have this cost/risk with paper. And ALL development participants (users, devs, designers, businessy types) can use pencil and paper expressively.
Bottom line: keeps the focus on the design and the user task and not on the clumsy medium. Helpful?
If you twisted my arm: I'd either say vanilla drupal instance with commmon modules (views, etc.), rails stack with widget libraries or ...Powerpoint.
Re: Ask HN: Clickable Prototypes
#14I just used Protoshare (http://www.protoshare.com) on a recent project, and it's a very good web-based tool for making clickable prototypes. It has good discussion features and there's an entire workflow for doing both wireframes and design comps as you get further along in the project.
Re: Ask HN: Clickable Prototypes
#15 I use goaloc ( http://github.com/mattknox/goaloc ) for rapid prototyping-it allows me to blow smart scaffolds out into rails code, which I then style. Usually, this gives me about the level of functionality I need for clickable prototypes. That said, I often prototype on paper, too.
Re: Ask HN: Clickable Prototypes
#16I just used Protoshare ( http://www.protoshare.com ) on a recent project, and it's a very good web-based tool for making clickable prototypes. It has good discussion features and there's an entire workflow for doing both wireframes and design comps as you get further along in the project.
Is anyone else using Protoshare? From the brief demo I saw it looked super-awesome, but I'm sure there are some "downsides" - any comments?
Re: Ask HN: Clickable Prototypes
#17You can try our tool.
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