I’m a freelance PM by day, an endless tinkerer, and I have a small confession. I’ve become obsessed with prototyping!
As a PM without design skills and limited front end experience, prototyping is my self expression.I flow through flows ( GET IT ?!? ) while leaving behind detailed instructions without any extra work.
My brainstormed mockups are elegant, comply with browser standards and designers grokk them fast (unlike my drawings :) ).
I remember working in balsamiq, exporting images to massive word files. Now I share a link to a functioning prototype that mimics the exact functionality I have in my head.
Nowadays, I create my prototypes with UX-App, a browser based mockup + prototyping tool, a tool I believe you should try right now. If you haven’t heard of UX-App, you’re probably used to creating prototype events in an interface that looks mostly like this:
Add a hotspot on top of a component and you can set up a single event that will be triggered when that hotspot is triggered. That’s pretty cool, and straight forward when you need to attach one bit of functionality.
But the UI we specify today is pretty damn complex, and being able to express it fully is important to me. With UX-App there are no hotspots, right clicking any component opens a context menu that leads to the interaction interface, a unique drag & drop puzzle like event canvas that lets me build every interaction with full control. Here’s how I prototype with UX-App: