Martin Tschofen — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:33:08 GMT

Great discussion. Tools will help make prototyping easier (eventually—I hope). While not all tools fit every project, they to me stimulate creative solutions because of their limitations.
While considering prototyping on a large project a couple of years ago and looking at various tools to do the job, I noticed that in order to do fast, iterative prototyping it helps to break interactions into reusable micro patters e.g. inline editing of text, progressive reveals of additional information. (Identifying these IA micro patterns during the process will allow for consistency in the design and faster development.)

To make such IA micro patterns interactive and easily changeable requires them to be reusable objects (think stencils in OmniGraffle or Visio.) Changing the underlying object should change it throughout your prototype. The prototyping tools I’ve seen don’t (yet) seem to focus on this approach.

To facilitate IA micro patters I pulled together a solution based on a wiki (DokuWiki) customized for the project. For each IA micro pattern I either used existing plugins or added new wiki syntax for each pattern. Hence it allows for quick prototype iterations using existing solutions—just to see if the ideas are worth pursuing.

The nice part about it is that it’s all open source, thus there are no restrictions.
And being able to collaborate in one space, do ongoing usability, online reviews, notations, without special software… improved the process tremendously.

Take a look: http://tr.im/1tet

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Martin Tschofen