The Interactive Ideas Blog

As we say elsewhere, we don’t have to convince you that website prototyping is a good idea. We all know it’s essential to a successful website development and deployment, there’s tons of research and white papers and, most effectively, your own hard-earned experience to back it up. But, we find that web designers and developers still don’t always do it. Site9 started out as a web services firm, so we have a lot of past experience working with clients on interactive projects. And we felt the same pain as you in trying to stay true to the prototyping process in the face of inadequate tools and client indifference.

Why don’t we prototype websites, even though we know we should? Well, there are many reasons. Often the client wants a quick turnaround and the only way to show them progress is with a design comp. Or if they are open to the idea of a wireframe or prototype, the available tools to make a prototype are either cheap, but ineffectual and clunky, or expensive and hard to use. Plus, getting clients to download and install software is never fun. The end result is generally a big stack of paper or e-mails with confusing diagrams, arrows going back and forth between various pages, notes and specifications that are unclear without interaction. You can actually see client’s eye glaze over when they start to go through the paper wireframes and lengthy requirement documents. This lack of client engagement and interest is always a letdown, and so it becomes easier to skip this step and move straight to design… and more frustration.

So several years ago, unhappy with the status quo, we started doing more research into prototyping. One book that got passed around the office was Ani Phyo’s Return On Design, now sadly out of print. In the book, she makes a strong case for user-centered website design and the need for information design principles to easily translate into an actionable website plan. She stresses that the best way for a website development team to execute on a plan is through prototyping. Around the same time we also discovered the writings of Jesse James Garrett, and his now legendary ‘Elements of User Experience’ diagram. Garrett was one of the first people to forcefully advocate for the process of website prototyping and good information architecture. Okay, this confirmed our own experiences on the benefits of website prototyping. But we still struggled to prototype effectively and within budget and time restraints.

As we transitioned away from services to software and developed Launch, our own design-to-deployment website development software, we made sure prototyping was one of it’s many features. We knew that we couldn’t offer a serious solution without providing that initial step. When our users started building sites with Launch, they were excited at how they could quickly and easily build an online interactive wireframe. And their clients were engaged from the beginning, because they could actually click through the site to see how it would work. They got it. Suddenly, prototyping seemed actually easy to do – and was clearly rewarding to the user. And they told us about it. A lot. This led us to develop ProtoShare™. Just think of it – now you can not only easily create a clickable interactive prototype, but you can collaborate with your clients through the entire process, all over the web and through your browser, no software required to install or maintain. And we think that’s pretty sweet.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 and is filed under Prototyping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.