Smashingly useful User Interface Prototypes (Smashing Magazine article, which includes Microsoft Expression Blend, that is…)

Smashing Magazine - Resurrecting User Interface Prototypes (Without Creating Zombies)

“Every user interface designer is familiar with this procedure to some extent: creating a prototype and evaluating it with potential users to understand how the user interface should look and behave. Users will tell you what nags them and should therefore be improved before you code. So, at the beginning of any UI design process, you can expect your prototype to have to be modified in order to work.

Because you (and your client) want the changes to be as cost-efficient as possible, you are better off adopting change-friendly prototyping methods and tools. This is especially true in the early stages of the project, when your ideas for potential solutions are rather vague. In this early phase, most often you don’t even know the exact problem for which you are hunting for a solution. You are still analyzing more than designing.

To work change-friendly and cheap, then, it’s wise to start the prototype roughly (maybe as a paper sketch) and make it more sophisticated as you understand the requirements—that is, assessing what users will need (or what they won’t need) and how willing your client is to give it to them (yes, those are not always in line).

Finally, when the prototype has reached a certain level of expressiveness, it could even serve as a “living specification” for developers, to tell them how the front end should look and feel. These are sometimes referred to as high-fidelity prototypes. As soon as the developers know exactly what to code, your high-fidelity prototype can die in peace. It has no future… Or does it?

While this approach is plausible and indeed makes perfect sense for many situations, it needs to be slightly reconsidered in the context of new UI paradigms.

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Prototype Recycling with Expression Blend

Let’s say you want to make use of Blend to design a NUI that is based on Silverlight or WPF and that lets you easily manipulate items on the screen. In the beginning, you wouldn’t even touch the tool at all; rather, you would “invent” whatever gesture you think is intuitive to perform this operation. Most likely, you would do this in your head or on a whiteboard. You’ll discuss and refine the design with teammates or potential users.

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Wrapping Up

To create a good user interface design, prototype your concepts and evaluate them with real users. The more natural you want the user interface to feel, the more details you will have to take care of. This makes prototyping more challenging and time-consuming than the conventional notion of prototyping, which is to “build something rapidly and cheaply.”

For this reason, some designers are tempted to simply turn their high-fidelity prototype into the actual system, as is. After all, throwing it away would be such a shame. But this approach is not advisable because it jeopardizes the system’s integrity, mainly because of the prototype’s messy internal structure, which arose as a result of the many changes that you implemented in response to user feedback.

Fortunately, modern prototyping tools such as Expression Blend allow you to create prototypes using different orthogonal concepts. They make it possible to split a prototype into parts and decide whether to throw out or keep each part individually.

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I thought it cool the depth this article when into… Oh yeah, and how they used Expression Blend to illustrate the points ;)