Awesome tools for rapid UX prototypes – Letting you focus on the solution!
June 18th, 2009 • Internet, agile, gtd, portal, programming, software development
Comic Life is great for creating story flows in a rough and ready way, with a little style.
Balsamiq is an excellent tool for rapidly creating purposefully low-fi wireframe mockups
Napkee enables you to import Balsamiq mockups and turn them into HTML prototypes! Lovely!
Axure is excellent for rapidly creating interactive prototypes.
Liferay Portal is a pretty awesome portlet container that, with a bit of UX (HTML, CSS and JSP) hacking, enables you to rapidly produce fully functional portals. It comes with a vast array of portlets out of the box, saving you a whole load of time.
JQueryUI is a lovely toolkit for quickly developing interactive prototypes. I’m not completely convinced by it as a production tool (heavy JS? but i could be wrong), but excellent for prototyping
3 Responses (Add Your Comment)
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Andy,
Really good list of UX prototyping tools!
I’ve tested and used most of the above (with the exception of comic life and LifeRay) and nothing really comes close to what Axure can do. We’ve started using it as the main engine for all our wireframing in the last 6-12 months, with great success even on some very complex system scenarios.
The only other one we did try and was a close contender to Axure was Adobe Flex (http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/). It was really good for one page interfaces but for larger scale journeys it became very cumbersome.
Hope your well?
Jonny
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Cheers Jonny. Yep, all is really well.
We have moved more toward low-fi prototypes and as such prefer balsamiq over Axure, but that is dependent on the project and the need. Both work great for their unique purposes and we still use both.
Regarding Liferay, over time i’ve grown to dislike it more. It’s still an interesting out of the box portal system, but it’s a bugger to customise – it’s too big and clumsy.
Hope you’re well
Found another: http://iplotz.com/ – A middle ground between Balsamiq and Axuer