Why Interactive Prototyping for web and mobile apps is necessary?

Interactive prototyping for web and mobile apps is essential and has grown significantly over the past decade.

These tools help designers collaborate with the clients better and reach a common conclusion to resolve their conflicts.

The visual overview of the project gives a better understanding to the client and thus builds understanding, explores options and barriers to the tasks in hands that you could not explore otherwise. So, it allows full creativity and experimentation for the team.

Moreover, these tools provide you room for improvement as there is always an opportunity to validate the things or situations that work.

There are many prototyping tools to choose from, which provides design agencies, designers, entrepreneurs, and businesses with more options.

To make life easier, we recommend the following evaluation criteria when selecting the best user interface prototyping tool that uniquely and optimally works for you knowing that there is no right tool(s) that works for everyone.

Our Proposed Evaluation Criteria For Selecting Prototyping Tools:

How Easy Is The Tool To Learn? No design agency or a UI UX designer wants to spend hours learning how to use a complicated platform.

The good news is that easy prototyping tools in the market are straightforward and can be realized with zero troubles; the shorter the learning cycle, the better. Unfortunately, in reality, most designers don’t have the spare time to learn long-winded tools.

In our opinion, a good start depends on how easy and intuitive the user interface prototyping tool/platform can be grasped.

Easy handling of the prototyping tool saves time, increases output, and allows a designer to complete his task quickly rather than moving through several unnecessary steps to get the desired outcome. It also enables the designer to get a hold of the tool quickly and helps them to complete their job perfectly.

Does It Come With Support?

Support is good, and if it’s quick, that’s a plus point. However, problems and difficulties are inevitable, and having someone to contact to get aid and support from is always crucial and a bonus. Moreover, the quality and variety of support are also significant.

Are there help documents, guides, tutorials, and videos on offer and available to back such supports?

This is a good question when considering design prototyping tools based on support.

Furthermore, good prototyping tools help with several tutorials and a good onboarding experience to quickly learn to use them to wow your stakeholders.

Sometimes, the complicated learning curve becomes a problem when the platform meets all your requirements by giving you everything required to make a great final product.

In such a case, the learning tutorial and helpful documentation work wonder to achieve your targets successfully.

So, good prototyping tools are a combination of rich functionality and a large number of tutorials. And support does not end here; customer support makes a big difference to help you encounter issues with the app.

Does it support different levels Of Fidelity?

As far as the level of fidelity is concerned, a prototype tool should allow navigation from one screen to another in case of a low fidelity level.

The tool should make a more precise design when we focus on layout, interaction design, and information at the medium-fidelity level. At the high-fidelity level, the tool should add motions and transitions.

The tool should enable us to design the prototype we need and quickly move from stage to stage. However, an app that gives a designer much control at the low fidelity level is inconvenient because it can distract you with irrelevant details.

Easy navigation is more important than alignment at this stage. The most important thing at the beginning stage is the right concept and not the size or color of the design.

At the medium-fidelity level, the designers’ primary purpose is to convey interaction and information. Factual information is required for this purpose, and graphics and final texts are finalized. A tool that enables you to sketch at this level is fine, taking your design to the next level.

At the last stage of growth, that is a high-fidelity level, and you will need all the components that were not much relevant before, like feedback messages, infrequent dialogues, disabled buttons, etc.

A tool with the features such as shows and hide banners and discussions and other user’s interactions help at this stage.

How Easy is it to Share your Prototypes With Your Team and Clients?

Sharing with your client for feedback helps you improve your work and get desired results from your work. In addition, communicating with your team members enables you to stay up to date and become more professional. 

The degree of features available on the design prototyping tools for sharing your prototypes with your team and clients. Are you limited to the number of people you can share your prototypes with?

In our opinion, the rule of thumb is to receive and take on board as much feedback as possible from each prototype. It will refine and improve the final product.

Can you Test on Multiple Devices?

A helpful tool has a dynamic layout to suit all screen sizes across all devices. It is a fundamental question you ask yourself before choosing a prototyping tool.

Does the tool/platform allow users to create a prototype for one device and test it on all devices (from smartphone to tablet and a desktop)? Again, this is a crucial requirement to determine the user experience across all devices.

This allows users to quickly capture how their app looks and feels across multiple devices before any complex coding can begin. In this way, it is quick and easy to change and improve designs before the app is built.

How Easy is it to Collaborate on the prototype?

Does the platform/tool allow teams and collaborators to communicate on the design screens easily? Likewise, having the freedom to invite as many or few collaborators to each of your prototypes is a plus point.

Does it support real-time design collaboration? The ability to have your team and clients discuss, iterate, and collaborate in real-time on a prototype upon the design screen is definitely a key feature to look out for.

Moreover, a good prototyping tool allows clients to access projects conveniently to provide feedback instead of giving it elsewhere. It is especially effective when the client and designers have different names for the same thing.

Does it facilitate the developer hand-off?

A prototyping tool should have features like automated style guide generation and specifications for project hand-off to developers.

This will speed up the process from design to development. Additionally, it will keep the designers focused on the actual development of the project.

Is interaction Handling Hassle-free?

Sometimes interactions on the prototyping tools make things much more complex and challenging to handle.

For example, a simple action like toggling a dropdown on and off causes the members to create an entirely new artboard for every change in state and make it challenging to find the right screen as the task needs a lot of scrolling.

So, to choose a tool, it is better to keep in mind if the tool facilitates our interaction or not.

How Long Does it Take to Create a Prototype?

The best android prototyping tool and web prototyping tool factor in the actual time it takes when generating a real-life prototype using uploaded image screens and other native or foreign tools.

There is no reason why creating a prototype should not be quick and straightforward with all the available choices in the market.

How Intuitive is The Tool?

How easy and well does the tool/platform allows users to simulate the end user’s intended interaction?

This includes transitions, scrolling, gestures, custom transitions, navigation between screens, and overall display and appearance.

Does It Allow Integration With Other Key Tools?

Nowadays, teams and companies use many other tools (e.g., Dropbox, Jira, Slack, Trello) in their everyday activities. Having a built-in integration with these third parties will help teams and businesses automate many workflow processes. In addition, this will help save time and ensure that every tool used represents the final version of the app.

Does it Integrate with your Workflow?

It is also of fundamental importance when choosing a prototyping tool to suit your design and other regularly use tools.

As prototyping involves research, testing, communication with the stakeholders, clients, and other team members and developers for final implementation, a tool should include handling most of these projects, if not all.

It is necessary for the Workflow as it will enable you to iterate under tight deadlines.

It will help if your prototyping tool could directly use the files produced by the designing tools instead of making you export assets individually and then rebuild the things from scratch to generate interactions.

The tools that enable you to test the app and record video simultaneously to analyze the data with your team members make things much easier for you.

Can you Keep Track of All Your Design Versions?

Feedback from your clients and team will surely spark creativity generating new design versions.

Each feedback may provide a new design version separately. Likewise, managing these versions from every input can be challenging, especially when working with large projects with more than 50+ design screens.

Does the platform/tool provide a design repository to maintain all versions?

A good question when evaluating and selecting a tool/platform.

One should consider whether it has a built-in version history control panel that is quick and easy to view evolving design files?

Pricing

How much does the tool/platform cost to use? Some providers charge license fees, yearly subscriptions, rolling month contracts, and many more.

All pricing plans are different and based on the number of users and the number of add-on features.

In our opinion, we feel the best two pricing plans are your rolling month contract.

In this contract, you can cancel at any time as you are not signed up for a lengthy contract, especially when you feel that this particular one is not right for you.

We also believe the pricing should increase the number of users/projects. In this way, customers are only paying for what they are using.

Templates allow you to share content (headers, footers, and more) that you can reuse on any screen or design while maintaining styles.

Moreover, some tools provide a free trial that allows you to decide if the tool is worth it. You cannot judge the working of a device without experience.

The test drive lets you know if you are satisfied with the experience or not. To see a tool and read about it is one thing while experiencing another.

Moreover, the trial should be long enough to help you decide about the platform by making a few mockups.

Security features:

Data security is one of the essential features that should be looked for in a prototyping tool as you won’t want your designs to be hacked or someone else to steal your best ideas.

This is why a prototyping tool should provide encryption and all the needed security features to make you work confidently and without any risks.

Web interactions:

Moreover, if the tool is rich in web interactions, you can reproduce any action without much technical expertise.

Regular updates:

A considerable number of users, designers, developers, and entrepreneurs access UI libraries regularly.

This is why it is vital to keep them updated, especially when you design for different platforms because it is a complicated process.

So, the best prototyping tools keep their libraries updated to get you covered.

Conclusion

By the day’s end, evidence beats opinion. Clients don’t want endless PowerPoints and back-and-forth emails, not forgetting to mention the never-ending meetings and specification documents.

Instead, they want to see evidence and grasp and play with the prototype ‘like a real app’ on their computer or mobile.

Read: How Simple Prototyping Platforms Can Win More Clients?

By embracing prototyping agencies, businesses will be working smarter and not more complicated when using a prototyping tool.

This will also result in more time to enjoy and consequently happier teams and clients. Everyone will start winning.

An important point to remember is that there are many prototyping tools available in the market, and it is essential to find the best one that suits you, your team, and your client’s interest. We hope you have found our evaluation criteria helpful.

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