The Digital Life

The Digital Life


Prototyping

June 04, 2015

Jon: Welcome to episode 106 of The Digital Life. A show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host, Jon Follett, and with me is founder, and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Hey, Jon. Good to be here.

Jon: I thought for our podcast today, we could chat a little bit about one of my favorite aspects of the software design process, which of course is the prototyping portion of that. I've noticed, nothing scientific here of course, but I've noticed that I'm hearing a lot more about software prototyping now. It's almost as if it's in vogue, in terms of being a technique that people are reasonably interested in incorporating into their user experience design process. You hear about people talking about it at conferences. There's a million different tools it seems like to prototype now. Very different from when I started in digital design. There are now numerous ways to prototype, even if you're not really a very skilled coder. You've got Axure, InVision, and iRise, and all sorts of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript frameworks. Not to mention, folks can use presentation software like Keynote or PowerPoint to do it. It really seems in the software design industry, we've reached some kind of general consensus that prototyping is the way to go, and we're entering this software prototyping renaissance. At least that's the way it looks to me.

I also remember that was not always so much the case. I wanted to talk with you about that today a little bit. Dirk, when you started down the design path, more than a decade ago, how was prototyping looked at at that point, and how has it evolved since?

Dirk: At that point, when we started Invo in 2004, and I had been doing digital design a couple of years before that as well, but just to focus on Invo, when we started the company, design firms were not doing digital prototyping. I'm sure there's probably a couple that I've never heard of, but for the most part, nobody was doing it. There still were certainly prototypes being made, but those prototypes were non-digital, whether it be things like paper prototyping, very low fidelity, or wireframes, God forbid, or screen mock-ups. Those are all prototypes as well, but the key is, they're not digital. They're not interactive prototypes. They might be made to be interactive in kludgy ways, but they don't get anywhere near approximating what the real use of the software would be. One of the ways in which we really innovated at Invo, was in digital prototypes being an expected, even mandatory, part of our process. While we were explicitly a design firm, and not an engineering firm, we had a similar number of engineers on staff as designers. Now, it's more common, but at the time was really unheard of.

That's always been core to our process. We philosophically believe, based on a lot of years of experience, and frankly, a lot of Andre's experience, Andre, one of the other original founders of Invo, who started the design team at Adobe and designed the Creative Suite, that to really design great software, you need to have kinetic digital prototypes that can give the designers, the product people, the engineers more robust feedback to how that software is actually going to be used, and perform. Today, that is a much more common practice. You still have design firms, and design teams without programmers, but at least for people who are claiming to design digital things, I think that's much more the exception, than the rule, which is remarkably different from 11 years ago.

Jon: We've seen that user experience has become more of a term that people recognize now. The industry has been accepted as part of the experience of putting together the right kinds of software. As the amount of software has increased, we've got all these mobile devices, additionally, UX has been raised up to be something more important than it was. Do you think these were contributing factors to prototyping gaining acceptance as well?