Issue 20 – August 2019
Debunking UX myths, prototyping for Child Welfare Services, how to test early, and prototyping with purpose.
Hi! I hope this newsletter, although a bit delayed this time due to a much-needed holiday, finds you well and you are already tackling the next challenges with pleasure. Regardless of the size and purpose of what’s lying ahead of you, embracing a prototyping mindset will help you get more clarity on what to build and how to best solve any given problem. But when building a prototype, it is important to always be clear about why you are building it in the first place. We all have limited resources and should invest our time and energy into the right things. So before jumping into prototyping just for prototyping’s sake, ask yourself: What is the primary objective of this prototype? What do we want to learn? How could this prototype influence the development of our product or service in a positive way? And also: How much risk are we willing to take and is this prototype worth taking this risk? Asking questions like this will help you find an approach that meets your requirements while still leaving enough room for experimentation, dedication, and focus.
Speaking of limited resources: You might have gotten the memo that climate change is real and the primary challenge of our lifetime. My two children and billions of others will live to see a world that’s transformed beyond our imagination, ultimately threatening our very existence if we don’t take action now. Climate change has finally found its way into mainstream media coverage but our leaders will have to take courageous and radical measures to avoid even more catastrophic damage. They will only act if we hold them accountable and demand action. Loud and clear and with one voice. On September 20, we need to put the pressure on by striking for the climate. If you would like to join, you can find or start an event near you on one of these websites: [https://globalclimatestrike.net](https://globalclimatestrike.net), [https://fridaysforfuture.org](https://fridaysforfuture.org), [https://www.sunrisemovement.org](https://www.sunrisemovement.org). Thank you! 🤗
– Happy prototyping! Matthias
Links
UX Myths – Prototyping, User Testing, and UX Deliverables
Prototypes take too much time, right? Prototypes are interactive dummies of the final designs, right? Five users will uncover 85 % of usability issues, right? False, false, and false again. In this piece, James Tucker answers why and debunks a few more common UX myths that pervade design projects.
https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/ux-myths-prototypes
Fjord and UX research: Prototyping for Child Welfare Services
Especially when you have very little time but have to come up with a meaningful solution that solves important problems, research and prototyping are invaluable. In this detailed case study, Rebeca Costa shares how Essi Salonen, Senior UX designer at Fjord, delivered a tangible prototype of a tool for the Child Welfare Services with her team that would help parents of children taken into foster care communicate with their caseworkers.
https://www.justinmind.com/blog/ux-research-fjord-case-study/
How To Test UX Design Early On In Your Process
Prototypes are useful to experiment with new ideas and to improve team collaboration, but most importantly, you can use them to test your assumptions with real users in different ways. In this article, Naomi Francis shares a few useful tips on how to test your design with prototypes effectively.
https://blog.marvelapp.com/how-to-test-ux-design-early-process/
Voice User Interface Design by Cheryl Platz
Jeremy Keith liveblogged from An Event Apart Chicago, where Cheryl Platz was speaking about voice interfaces. The resulting notes are quite insightful: What makes natural language interactions so special? How do you get started? Why are sample dialogues your new wireframes, and why are functional prototypes really important for designing and delivering voice user interfaces?
https://adactio.com/journal/15737
How Google Uses Rapid Prototyping to Validate Ideas (And So Can You)
5,127. That’s the number of prototypes it took James Dyson to develop his revolutionary bagless vacuum cleaner. But this is not the only interesting fact Emilia Bratu shares in her article: She also walks you through the three main rules of Tom Chi’s approach to learning, who heavily used prototypes to quickly evaluate ideas and concepts when developing Google Glass.
https://www.qualitance.com/blog/how-google-uses-rapid-prototyping/
Prototype with a Purpose
Prototyping can be useful in many different situations. From best-case scenarios to the worst, they help you decide what to do and what not to do. Shan Shen writes about how to prototype with purpose: How prototypes can put continuity to work, how you can test the endurance of details of your design, and how to leverage prototyping when designing for temporary disabilities.
https://www.framer.com/blog/posts/prototype-with-purpose/
Tools
Introducing Drama
Drama App is a new all-in-one design, prototyping, and animation tool. It allows you to draw scenes and create interactive triggers to create prototypes with automatic transitions. Thanks to a feature called Magic Move layers with the same name are automatically animated during those scene transitions. But you can also use timeline editors to create your animations. With a Mirror App, you can run your prototypes on iPhones and iPads, it allows you to use 3D layers, and has built-in versioning to access all previous versions of your document.
https://www.drama.app/
Meet ProtoPie 4.0: Accelerate Your Workflow with Components
The ProtoPie team has been busy adding new features to their already great prototyping tool: Besides a new brand design, version 4.0 brings reusable interaction components, constraints for responsive resizing, a revamped scene panel, and much more.
https://blog.protopie.io/meet-protopie-4-0-accelerate-your-workflow-with-components-e2c97f17bf3e
August 2019 Release of Adobe XD: CSS Code Snippets in Design Specs, Improved Integration with Photoshop, and a New Frontier for XD Plugins
The August release of Adobe XD brought the ability to open and edit images in Photoshop right from XD, CSS code snippets in Design Specs, but most importantly: The new Plugins Panel now allows plugins to live right next to the design canvas and several new plugins for XD already take full advantage of this.
https://theblog.adobe.com/xd-august-2019-update-auto-css-plugins-panel-more/
Turn Adobe XD into production apps with Supernova V7
Supernova is a tool that lets you create interactive apps and generate production-ready code from your design files, including production-ready animation code. Now, it also supports Adobe XD files. You can import the design to get started and Supernova even allows you to reimport files when you make any changes.
https://blog.prototypr.io/turn-adobe-xd-into-production-apps-with-supernova-v7-aba1cf8ae01
OverVue, a Vue Prototyping Tool
OverVue is a tool to prototype Vue.js apps. It’s is a desktop application built with Vue and Electron that lets you create Vue components and set up routes with Vue Router, all in a graphical user interface. You can then generate boilerplate code for a project.
https://medium.com/better-programming/overvue-a-vue-prototyping-tool-f2b8a2f0c229