Philip Fierlinger — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:08:52 GMT

I’m a big fan of prototypes. My entire career has revolved around prototyping.

In my experience, there are major problems with HTML prototypes:

1. HTML + CSS need to be well formed to look/work properly, requiring too much time + effort to build the prototype, time that should be spent designing and refining your concepts.

2. Design refinements are painful and time consuming because you have to re-engineer your code.

3. Re-engineering makes you reluctant to make significant changes, so you end up exploring fewer alternatives (the main purpose of prototyping).

4. There is a natural inclination to build on top of the prototype code, as the starting point for the production code. Prototype code, by it’s definition, is a hack. That’s an awful starting point for production code.

I find Flash to be the ideal prototyping tool.

Flash is a drawing tool – you just draw your design, no coding whatsoever, so significant changes take no time at all. Plus, it’s 100% compatible in ALL browsers.

If you want to make an interactive prototype then Flash can be coded with one basic line of Actionscript: onRelease.gotoAndStop(frame).

If you want to build more complex functionality with drag-and-drop then you can, and it requires less expertise than Javascript. Again, it’s 100% compatible in ALL browsers.

Flash prototypes won’t be completely identical to the final experience, but no prototype is. Flash prototypes can be as lo-fi or as hi-fi as you want. With Flash there is no limitation to the concepts and feature ideas that you can simulate – it’s an unlimited toolbox.

With Flash you explore more ideas, more quickly, producing better solutions. It’s as simple as that.

Philip Fierlinger
http://skyrize.com

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Philip Fierlinger