scott parsons — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 08:58:12 GMT

While the process in this article is a good look at the possibilities available in PDF prototyping, I’m one of those who doesn’t see the point. PDFs are so slow and cumbersome that I tend to avoid them for anything more than viewing basic documents.

If I want a quick prototype, I will use paper, or a tool like denim (http://dub.washington.edu/denim/). If I want a more hifi prototype then HTML would be my medium of choice. But visio also has the ability to export fairly usable clickable prototypes which can be quite useful as well. Then there are the tools like Axure which are all about creating prototypes, which make what you can do with PDFs look like a waste of time.

Of course some work situations mean that securing time from someone to build an HTML prototype is next to impossible and using whatever tools you know best is often the best plan. However to me this article is stretching the capabilities of PDF and given the proliferation of PDF viewers which aren’t from adobe I would be worried about it working in unknown environments

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by scott parsons