Jacco Nieuwland — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:59 GMT

Great article, I really wish I had more time to check out some of these tools for myself. I’ve been dealing with prototypes a lot more over the last year as well, and have found that certain ideas and solutions are much better communicated though an interactive demonstration than through the paper wireframes.

One other solution that wasn’t covered in the article is a sort of halfway solution between static wireframes and fully interactive prototypes. I’ve created swirp to do just that. You create your sitemaps/screenflows wireframes in the standard way using visio, but you then you press the magic button and out comes an interactive HTML prototype. Definitely not HiFi, it can only be used to show navigation concepts (no text input etc.). But it does provide all the benefits that Visio gives you (perfect prints, annotations, multiple documents so more than one designer can work on it, etc). Check it out at swipr.com (free & open source!).

In the end it probably all boils down to the right tool for the right job. And time and money restrictions are always a problem, of course.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Jacco Nieuwland