don bruns — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:29:52 GMT

Great article!

I’m also very pleased to see that prototyping is coming into the mainstream. As a former developer who made the transition to IA several years ago, I always tried to encourage my colleagues to prototype as much as possible. I got a lot of push-back because so few of my colleagues knew (or wanted to learn) HTML.

With the advent of tools like Axure and iRise, that seems to be changing. UX types are actually embracing prototyping. For simple brochure-ware websites, it’s not a big deal. But when you’re building actual web applications, the prototyping stage is crucial.

Unlike wireframing, prototyping forces (and better enables) the entire team to think through all the precise interactions of every page and every control on that page. When you’re designing a very complex GUI design, with very robust logic, it’s very easy to miss all the possible logic landmines that a user may step on if you’re only sketching out pictures.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by don bruns