Our conclusion of Rapid Digital Prototyping: It’s got the look and feel of pen and paper, but adds interactivity (making wireframes clickable) and enhances developing speed through re-usable elements and layers. Many (real-time) collaboration modules enable interface designers to new ways to work with higher efficiency, leaving more time for the creative process that really counts.

Everybody who is into screen design, Rapid Paper Prototyping is old school! But ever considered doing screen design on screen?

With pidoco’s web-based prototyping software, interaction designers and screen developers can save valuable time, enhance the creative process and build better usability for the WWW.

Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been in the know for a while to get a web-application started. The basic concepts of the layout will be put on paper and discussed within the team. This design will then go through an ongoing, sometimes collaborative, design process by implementing feedback from different stake holders. This paper-built screen will eventually act as a roadmap for the whole project – from start to finish. Some screen-designers even use these basic sketches for running usability tests. Retrieving problems in the use cases in an early stage of development can save a lot of time and budget, since later alterations in the so called ‘finished’ web application are minimized.

Anyway, there are some drawbacks to Rapid Paper Prototyping.  Paper prototypes are difficult to add to the project documentation and also difficult to share between team-members. Transforming paper prototypes into clickable wireframes for web testing is also a time consuming task as we all know!

That is why many companies create their prototypes directly in MS PowerPoint or other diagramming tools and have them distributed to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the designs more effectively but it is not really more interactive than making copies of a piece of paper handing it to the team. The Visio-type static wireframes still do not show the real functionality:  links, dynamic menus and checkboxes etc. cannot be reproduced effectively and need to be explained individually in long text. Again, more time and effort has to be invested to get the message across.
pidoco° has selected this problem and made it their task to tackle it by providing a fast web-based interface design software.

Our conclusion of Rapid Digital Prototyping: It’s got the look and feel of Rapid Paper Prototyping, but adds interactivity (making wireframes animated) and enhances developing speed through re-usable elements and layers. Many (real-time) collaboration features enable interface designers to new ways to work with much better time allocation, leaving more time for the creative process that really counts.

Our conclusion of Rapid Digital Prototyping: It’s got the look and feel of pen and paper, but adds interactivity (making wireframes animated) and accelerates developing speed through re-usable elements and layers. Many (real-time) collaboration components enable interface designers to new ways to work with higher efficiency, leaving more time for the creative process that really counts.