Prototyping for Designers
by davidI was at Rich Web Experience last week and Yahoo’s Bill Scott presented a session on his recently unveiled prototyping library. It’s called Protoscript and he’s written a blog post as well. Both of these sources get technical fairly quickly so the implications may not be immediately obvious to non-programmers. Even though Protoscript is still very much a work in progress and there’s some distance between its current state and Bill’s vision for its future, the opportunities it opens up are are exciting.
The driving force behind this library is Bill’s opinion that “Prototyping is too hard for non-techies”. I wouldn’t make quite the same blanket statement, but I do agree that some of the most useful, effective prototyping approaches do require developer resources or developer assistance. These technical resources are not always readily available. Protoscript shifts the requirements and ultimately will allow designers with little or no actual coding expertise to rapidly prototype in an interesting way.
The Protoscript bookmarklet allows you ‘inject’ Ajax behaviors into existing web pages. That means you can start with an html mockup or a client’s existing site as a starting point and try all sorts of different approaches. Do you have a list of items somewhere on a web page? Want to see what it would be like if they were drag and drop elements? Want to see what it would look like if you could delete list elements and have them fade and disappear? Somebody asks to see what they would look like in some sort of accordion layout? Imagine being able to run through those three iterations in the space of 10 minutes. Now imagine being able to do that as a designer without a developer to help you.
Being able to get by without development resources will require the completion of the GUI interface Bill envisions but even in its current state, Protoscript could fundamentally change work flows. A designer and a developer can sit together over a common screen run through ideas in a much more lightweight way than they currently can. Or, in other words, Protoscript shifts this type of prototyping from a multi-day email interchange with the IT department to something that feels more like sketching quickly on whiteboard.
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September 13th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
There’s a germ of a great idea in Protoscript: that you can describe most interaction on a page with a combination of Element+Event+Response, but the syntax for it is too fiddly right now. It’s just as easy to learn some basic jQuery or Prototype to get this level of interaction. Hopefully a GUI would simplify things, but there is a long (long) history of this kind of product where a designer just drags and drops a behavior onto an object and presto! They usually don’t really work all that well, either they’re way too simple or way too complex.
Also: GRR! “distance between it’s current state and Bill’s vision for it’s future,” That should be “its” in both cases, not “it’s.”
September 14th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Clients and designers very often don’t know what they want until they see it. Tools like this will get them closer to asking for what they really want. I have found that it is often a good excercise to have them develop forms, copy, and layout in a static mode (say Photoshop image or Dreamweaver HTML) and then have them get estimates based on this near net condition. They can be Dr. Frankenstein and the project managers and developers can be the Igor that makes it come alive. It would be nice if this took off and it became a verb: “hey, photoscript and we will get you a quote…”
September 14th, 2007 at 11:13 am
[...] adaptive path » blog » david verba » Prototyping for Designers I was at Rich Web Experience last week and Yahoo’s Bill Scott presented a session on his recently unveiled prototyping library. It’s called Protoscript and he’s written a blog post as well. Both of these sources get technical fairly quickly so the implications may not be immediately obvious to non-programmers. Even though Protoscript is still very much a work in progress and there’s some distance between it’s current state and Bill’s vision for it’s future, the opportunities it opens up are are exciting. [...]
September 14th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
What’s great about this is that it’s such a pain to prototype anything with state changes compared to static content-centric layouts, whether the change is because of Ajax or Flash or whatever. Storyboarding can work for something with a linear and unchanging sequence, like animation or video, but breaks down with interactive content with multiple flows or outcomes. This is great!