It can be difficult to understand the difference between a prototype and a mockup, but they’re not the same. A prototype is more than just sketches or an early pre-launch interface; it’s also used as input for testing new design ideas with users before investing time into developing any software systems based on those insights. That’s why you need the best prototyping tools.
There are few skills more potent or important than prototyping. The act of creating a prototype—from simple wireframes through testing and final visuals–is an essential part of any designer’s portfolio and UI UX design services but it can also destroy your hard work if not done properly with care.
A business’ knowledge about how they want their product to function may change depending on who will be using them; this means there could potentially always need another step between deciding what should go into each interface element (a process called “prototyping”) and then actually building those designs as opposed to just designing something outright without ever getting feedback from customers.
What Is a Prototype?
The goal of a prototype is to test and validate ideas before sharing them with stakeholders. The result may be different from what you originally thought, but it’s important for designers (and everyone) involved in this process–from UX team members down through engineers on their teams to have access to real data about how our designs will perform when put into production conditions so that we can make adjustments along the way if needed!
What is the Importance of prototyping in UI UX design?
The prototyping process is a critical step in the UI/UX Design Process. It offers many benefits.
1. User Testing
By prototyping, designers can gather feedback early on from users. Designers can create interactive prototypes to observe how users interact and identify pain points before investing in development.
2. Visualizing Design Concepts
Prototypes allow designers to visualize their final product and bring their ideas into reality. It helps stakeholders better understand the design proposal and give valuable feedback for refinement.
3. Iterative Design
Prototyping allows designers to quickly create multiple versions, test them and refine them according to user feedback. Iterative design helps create a user-centered product that is effective in meeting user needs.
4. Communication and Collaboration
Prototypes serve as an essential communication tool between designers, developers, stakeholders, and other teams involved with the project. They act as visual representations of designs that encourage collaboration while making sure everyone involved with the project shares similar goals.
5. Save Time and Resources
By early identification of usability problems via prototyping, user testing, or any other means available to designers for testing user reactions to products early on through prototyping, user testing or any other means available to them, designers can save money and resources in costly redesigns and rework of their designs; further minimizing risks involved with creating products that do not meet user expectations and needs.
6. Enhancing User Experience
Prototyping provides designers the opportunity to optimize the user experience based on feedback from users, such as by restructuring interactions, navigation flows, and visual elements. Prototyping allows designers to craft intuitive interfaces which are user-friendly while offering pleasant experiences for end-users.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Prototyping
Advantages of prototyping
- Validation of research findings
There may be better solutions than early research on a project. Testing reveals a lot of positive feedback and bugs. Prototype testing provides additional insight and validates initial findings, offering more perspective than initial findings alone can show.
- Apps
Prototyping can evaluate ideas and concepts during design, proving their worth at different development points.
- Issues and errors identification
The prototyping process allows for identifying issues and biases or errors that were introduced to research at an early stage.
- End-User engagement
Prototyping can provide an excellent way of engaging potential clients and gathering their feedback on a solution while providing more in-depth knowledge about it and helping to establish its value.
Prototyping disadvantages
Additional time and costs
It is cheaper than you think. Although prototyping can help make informed decisions regarding the design direction of a product or service, it still comes with additional costs. This is because recruiting users, testing and making alterations, and testing again takes time.
Recruitment of end-users
The type of testing and the feedback that is collected is heavily dependent on the end users who have been recruited to test the solution. Important insights can be missed if the recruitment process is inaccurate or does not include a wide range of users.
The Most Useful Prototyping Methodology
Paper Prototyping
Paper prototyping is a great way to explore ideas with your team early in the design stages. It’s not about what you create but how fast and many different concepts can be generated during these sessions – which are often held on a whiteboard or paper sketching tools like Google SketchUp (now called Duets).
Digital Prototyping
Digital prototyping is a powerful tool that allows designers to test their ideas quickly and efficiently. There are two types of digital prototypes, low-fidelity (with wireframes) or high fidelity–the latter being much like the final product in terms of visuals/user experience, etc., though both provide valuable insight for testing purposes among other things such as understanding what users do at certain points within your workflow so it can be improved upon before launch day!
HTML & JavaScript Prototyping
When you need to create prototypes that function like the final product, there’s no better way than UXPin merge! With this design tool from code-based high fidelity prototype (or “fully functional,” as they say) test out your ideas and see how things play out before investing time into development. All users have access without having any technical skills at all.
UX prototyping software is a platform or application that allows designers to create interactive user experience prototypes. These tools allow designers to test and visualize the functionality, flow, and usability of products and websites before they are developed.
What are ux prototyping tools and what are ui prototyping tools?
Some of the most popular UX prototyping tools include:
- Sketch is a vector-based design software with plug-ins that allows you to create interactive prototypes.
- Adobe XD is a design and prototyping software that allows designers to create interactive experiences.
- Figma is a collaborative tool for designers that allows them to create interactive prototypes.
- InVision: This platform allows designers to create interactive prototyping and collect stakeholder feedback.
- Axure RP is a comprehensive UX prototyping tool with advanced features to create complex interactions.
UI prototyping software, on the contrary, focuses on creating visual representations for the user interface elements (UI) of a website or product. These tools help designers determine an interface’s layout, typeface, colors, and visual style.
Some of the most popular UI prototyping tools include:
- Adobe Photoshop: An image-editing software widely used in UI design, prototyping, and other areas.
- Sketch: Due to its vector capabilities, Sketch is a UX prototype tool and a popular UI design tool.
- Figma is a UX prototyping tool that is used to design UI elements and interfaces.
- Adobe Illustrator: This vector-based software is often used to create UI designs and icons.
- Marvel: A platform for designers that makes it easy to create interactive UI prototyping.
Although there are some similarities between UX prototyping and UI UX prototyping tools offer greater functionality in creating interactive experiences and testing flows for users. In contrast, UI tools focus primarily on the interface’s visual design.
How to create a Prototype and what is the Process?
Paper => Lo-fi Digital => Hi-fi Digital => Code
Once the team has brainstormed and sketched out lots of ideas, they will then convert those sketches into digital wireframes. Next up is implementing user flows—a process in which we imagine what our end-users would do while using one part or all features on an app; this helps us decide whether each page should have two columns (Towers) or four buttons per row (Piles).
Paper => Lo-fi Digital => Code
Lo-fi prototyping is cheap, but it doesn’t catch many usability issues exposed by high-fidelity prototypes.
Product developers without design skills might use the paper -to code method because they’re quicker at coding than learning how to use a tool like Photoshop or Illustrator; however, there’s no need for them to go through all those steps when you can just make your hi-fidelity prototype in Google SketchUp before printing off copies on PDFs right from within this free software!
HTML Prototyping => Code
The prototype stage is an opportunity for designers and developers to test out their ideas. It’s not only faster, but also more effective in testing the waters with potential customers before making any substantial changes or enhancements that could potentially break everything you’ve worked so hard on!
Paper =>UXPin Merge – Hi-fi Prototyping => Code
UXPin’s merge allows designers to quickly create high-fidelity prototypes that are more realistic than ever before. It works by allowing you to input code from the comfort of your own home and get an instant understanding of how it will look in real life, without having any travel time involved!
Best Prototyping tools for UI/UX designers
Figma
Platform available: Web MacOS Windows
Cost: No cost for 3 Figma or 3 FigJam files. Paid plans start at $12/editor/month and include unlimited Figma files as well as version history. Designlab students are eligible for a 1 year professional Figma account through our Perks Page.
Ideal for: Quick, real-time collaboration.
Figma is the most popular prototyping tool used by UX/UI designers. You can easily create wireframes and polished interfaces within the same cloud-based interface. Click on the Prototype tab and set up interactions and clickable flow through your design.
Are you interested in learning more about Figma design? Register for the Figma 101 course and learn the basics as well as the advanced features of Figma to make the most of this powerful prototyping tool.
InVision Studio
InVision was released in 2011. They have a solid reputation and are a favorite among designers. Their dedication to adding new functionality to their design platform and rolling out new functionality has made them a popular choice. InVision offers designers the ability to quickly create functional prototypes and share them with others using a variety of well-designed tools. There are many great features in InVision, such as a vector drawing tool, repeatable parts that can be modified sitewide, and tools to create animations and other dynamic visual effects.
InVision’s strengths include collaboration and communication. InVision’s freehand software allows team members to draw, take notes, and give feedback. Invision Spaces allows team members to stay organized. It creates one source of truth for all those involved in the project. InVision has a handy feature that allows developers to hand off information, which makes it easier for them to collaborate.
Adobe XD
Adobe XD can be used to create and prototype collaborative designs.
Price: $9.99/month for a standalone tool or $52.99/month when you purchase the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite
Functionality: Wireframing, prototyping, UI design, collaboration
Adobe XD is available to anyone. Anyone can use Adobe XD.
Perfect for: Create static designs and turn them into interactive prototypes with one tool
Platforms MacOS (v10.15 and later), Windows 10, most browsers
Adobe XD offers two modes of operation: Prototype mode and Design mode. You can create static designs by adding elements to artboards in Design mode. Artboards are the various app screens and website pages.
You can then switch to Prototype mode to transform static designs into interactive prototypes. You can create interactive links between your artboards, i.e. screens to model the flow of your app or website.
Your prototype can be shared with others using a URL or embed code. Stakeholders can provide feedback directly within the prototype if you enable the commenting function.
Sketch
A sketch can be used to create static designs, and prototypes, and for developer handoff.
Price:$9/month for the Standard plan (for individuals or teams)
Functionality: Wireframing, prototyping, UI design, collaboration
Sketch is available to anyone who can use it. Although Sketch is great for beginners, it is not available on MacOS.
Ideal for: Light prototyping
Platform: MacOS
You first create static designs in Sketch using Sketch’s flexible vector editor tools. The prototyping function allows you to preview your designs, and navigate between Artboards
You can convert static screens to interactive prototypes quickly by adding links between two Artboards. To fine-tune your prototypes, you can add Hotspots or fix certain elements. Setting start points will allow you to see which Artboard the prototype begins with.
You can preview Sketch prototypes in three ways: in Sketch (for Mac), in Sketch Mirror on an iOS device, or in the web application.
ProtoPie
ProtoPie, a powerful and flexible prototyping tool, is highly regarded by the design community because of its intuitive interface and virtually non-existent learning curve.
Platform, MacOS Windows
Cost: No cost for 2 prototypes or 2 recorded interactions per prototype. Paid plans start from $69/user/month and include unlimited prototyping and interaction recordings.
Ideal for: High-fidelity prototypes that behave and look exactly like fully coded products.
ProtoPie is a prototyping tool that is unique to the rest of our tools. You will need to import static designs from another program first. ProtoPie plugins are available for Sketch, Adobe XD, and Figma.
After you have imported your wireframes, you can make them interactive by adding triggers and responses to the objects. The user action that “causes” the interaction is called the trigger. To set the trigger in motion, the user must interact with the object. The interaction’s response is what happens after the interaction, such as opening a link or jumping onto another page. These interactions can be created by selecting pre-made triggers or responses from the drop-down list in the toolbar.
You can then use additional tools and features to enhance your interactions. The preview window allows you to preview your prototypes, upload them to cloud storage and share a link or create a QR code that you can scan to see the prototype with your smartphone. ProtoPie is powerful and easy to use. This combination makes it a great choice for UX designers.
Marvel
Marvel, a tool that allows digital designers to quickly prototype, test, and then hand off their ideas, has been endorsed by companies like Nokia, Monzo, and BuzzFeed.
Price Free to create one project; EUR9/month for the Pro plan (ideal if you are an individual); EUR27/month for the Team plan (3+ people)
Functionality Wireframing, Rapid Prototyping, Testing and Handoff
Marvel is available to anyone. You can use Marvel as a solo UX designer or in small groups.
Ideal For: Designers Who Want to Design, Prototype, and Test in One Platform
Works with Marvel, a browser-based program
You have two options to prototype with Marvel: either import static designs from other sources or create wireframes using premade elements and icons. You can also use the Sketch plugin to sync Sketch files.
Marvel’s prototyping tool for designers is very simple. Once you have your static designs in place, hover over any file in your project and click “Prototype”. You will be taken to the editor. Here you can add effects, transitions, and gestures to your hotspot links.
FAQ
What Are the Best Prototyping Tools Used for in UX/UI Design?
A prototypical is an easy model or mockup of an idea or concept which can be used to test assumptions made regarding its design. A prototype allows UX designers to easily evaluate what assumptions were made when developing a product/service concept or prototype.
What’s the Difference between Prototyping and Mockups?
Mockups are high-fidelity renderings of your design that show what the final product will appear like, while prototypes give stakeholders an idea of what its appearance might be like.
