The Evolving Worker

Getting Real is a great book, advocating simplicity and pragmatism in web application development. In fact, the advices in this book also apply to most kinds of projects (a recommended reading).

After re-reading it, I wanted to find some tool to achieve rapid prototyping and user interface design in a more efficient way (for those times where pen and paper do not feel good enough).

User interface design with no code

My brother advised me to have a look at Axure RP. I started trialing it a couple of days ago and must say if you care about designing features of a web products without getting into the code too quickly, it’s a tool really worth trying out.

Beside the usual widgets placement features, it supports conditional interactions, notes-taking, versioning with Subversion. Once a page is designed, it’s possible to export it either to HTML (with javascript interaction included) or to a Word document (to play the role of functional specifications).

Definitely worth trying. If you do so, be sure to check out the two following resources:

• the product tour gives a good overview of what’s possible with Axure RP
• the how to use guide is a pleasant 2-hours tutorial, designed to give you a pretty good insight

Other prototyping tools

I also discovered (but did not try so far):

• Balsamiq Mockups – full fledged prototyping tool
• the Pencil Project – free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping
• Protonotes – a way to add notes on the real prototype to exchange with your team