Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Other Types of Prototypes

While paper prototypes are useful when you’re working with users face to face, sometimes, that’s not an option. How do you rapidly create a prototype you can test remotely without having to jump into Drupal development?

Enter an entire world of digital prototyping software. With these applications, once you get over the initial learning curve, you can create hotspots in your layouts, link them to other pages in your prototype, and mimic a wide range of responses to user inputs. You can test the prototypes in person, or use screen sharing/recording software like Silverback (http://silverbackapp.com/) to test your work with people from their own computers.

If you’re already using Adobe Fireworks for creating your wireframes or design layouts (see Chapter 7), you can incorporate Hot Spots in your Fireworks layouts to link areas of the layout with other pages in your layout, and export the file as a clickable prototype. Other options for clickable prototypes include:

Axure

Axure (http://www.axure.com/) is a desktop program for Mac and Windows, favored by a number of UX designers. The program also has a number of specialized widgets (UX symbols and images) available for free on their website for customizing your prototypes. In addition to being able to create a complete clickable prototype in one document, Axure also allows you to easily create user flows (to show task flows for specific screens) and include them in the prototype. It also allows you to annotate ...