C4 Studio: A prototyping-animations tool for the future

It has not been long since I joined the prototyping world and every day I tend to find something novel. Things that just blow me away and things that remind me about the creativity and resourcefulness of designers. Lately I’ve started working with app prototyping tools for iOS, for which there are currently dozens of options in the market. Interestingly, few of them actually help designers experiment with animations during the design process, and even less when they have to explain their design decisions to the programmers that will code up the app.

The C4 team at Logic & Form observed an existing gap between designers and developers when it comes to app production pipelines. It seems there are some coordination issues between these two players — as if designers and developers were discouraged to try new things due to the difficulty of translating their original designs into programmable, working apps. The difference in mindsets between the two groups makes it difficult to achieve a smooth production pipeline.

What if the designer wants to include a gesture in the App that can’t be easily described? What if the developer coding the App has limited spatial understanding of a designer’s complex transition animation or is confused by the description given? What if the developer has to code different solutions for similar animations and interactions from scratch every time?

Certainly, hours of work could be saved in the process of converting design concepts into massively used apps or mobile experiences. Current tools are getting there but not quite. Developers could use a better hand-off from designers than only visual assets and a verbal description of expected behaviours. They could use an input that is closer to their field of work: Code.

I believe that translating design decisions into usable code would be a step forward to increase cross-functional synergies in app development teams. Production pipelines would become leaner and designers more empowered — all while simplifying developers’ lives. C4 Studio is a project aimed to test exactly these hypotheses in the following months.

You have to consider there is only so much you can design when it comes to mobile applications. I know the market demands for app simplicity and that human perception (paired with dexterity) restricts how far we can experiment with our apps. But the fact that available prototyping tools constrain designers to try new things also contributes to this tendency to avoid experimentation.

Most tools seem primarily concerned with basic app screen transitions. They include predefined gestures that trigger standard animations that can be combined in matter of seconds, allowing initial designs to test interactions and user flows before they are signed off for production. While I recognize the underlying usefulness and efficiency this affords to simplified decision-making, I fear it might also constrain creative designers.

It seems to me that; most available options are a little stale and safe. I think the “state of the art” of mobile interactivity is reaching some form of creative stagnation.

Helping designers showcase their designs to internal and external clients is also a major feature of prototyping tools. Even the newest tools include interaction components and help structure basic user flows, as they strive to compete in an increasingly saturated industry.

All prototyping software have similar tools and features, but not all of them can solve all of the prototyping process issues. Not all of them can be an animation tool. Not all can excel at app architecture. And not all are as good at transitioning designs from prototyping to production. The C4 Studio project aims toward the latter field of pre-production tools by focusing more on improving the designer-developer work dynamics.

What do you think? Are prototyping and interaction becoming boring and standardized? Is there a lack of creativity? Would we prototype more innovative animations if we had better tools available? Are there any other ways of revolutionizing current production pipelines?

We’ll see how future developments of C4 Studio could solve some of these questions!

See ya.

David.