As a freelancer, I’m still puzzled about prototyping. I would ditch it entirely in favor of designing right in the browser.

There are proper JS frameworks out there, responsive design is mature now, and you have lots of tiny Vanilla JS libraries that cover pretty much every animation, morphing and transition you can think of.

Of course this requires designers that can code, but to me this is the real shift the industry has to make. You can still follow a wireframe approach, your first version can be as naked as it can be, but at least it’s already functional. And ready for designers and devs to lay upon it every conceivable styling and animation/transition.

I think “agile” can mean “from pencil to code”. Let’s be honest: pretty much all of the combinations of UIs have been explored, and by now we’re just repeating or copy/pasting what works. But of course, this is something we don’t want the agency’s client to know.