My Experience with Sketch Cloud & Prototyping

by one of our Tappable App Developers team; George Henderson

As a product designer I’ve been using Sketch to create my designs for many years now, and to watch it grow and adapt to the ever-changing requirements of working designers never fails to excite me. Over time, Sketch has introduced prototyping, where you can preview your designs with animated interactions from within the file you’re working on.

It’s been out for some time now, but out of fear of show-stopping bugs preventing it from becoming a staple in our workflow, I decided to give it a bit of breathing space (and updates) before I tried to completely adopt it. Now that it’s at a good place, along with the mothership known as Sketch Cloud being present, I decided to finally take the dive and see if it’s as great as the packaging dresses it up to be.

To start with, let’s get into the positives of using Sketch prototyping:

• The ability to validate micro-journeys as you’re designing

Throughout the creation stage I found myself prototyping my screens as I was designing them. This helped me to be so much more mindful of a buttons destination — not just it’s placement. The ability to swiftly preview a specific journey of a design in the same place you’re creating it proved invaluable when it came down to validating and hardening my own work. I also found that this helped me to remain in ‘the zone’, rather than break out of what I’m doing in Sketch to go export screens to an external prototyping resource.

When curating journeys, it’s easy to prototype as you progress.

• Prototyping links move with your designs — saving lots of time

Typically after I’ve finished my designs for an app or game, I would export all of these screens to flat PNGs and then upload to an external prototyping site — be it either Flinto or Marvel in the past. I’d then have to account for additional time to create a separate prototype using this external source, and then have to redo similar steps once any changes are made to the product (be it client or internal changes). The great thing about prototyping within Sketch is that the links move with the asset that holds that link. This means if a client requests that the main CTA button be in the top left of the screen as opposed to the right, I can now just move that button in my design file without needing to export, update and reassign hotspots. This is a double-edged sword however, as you need to be mindful of existing links to assets when duplicating or removing content.

Prototyping and previewing is done in a few simple clicks.

• A shareable window view of all screens in the Cloud

Through the use of Sketch Cloud, I’m able to push all my designs to a viewable platform on the web where all of my artboards are displayed in order. The ability to share this overview with colleagues and clients helps further open up the channel between the design team and those with interest in viewing the deliverables.

An example of wireframes in Cloud, ready to talk through with a client.

• Versioning of designs and prototypes backlog

There’s a really nice versioning function on Sketch Cloud which shows you a timeline of all of the previous pushes made to the document. This also includes the prototype that was created alongside that version. This is great because I’m now able to have a backlog of previous designs — and with that, decisions made — to reference back to whenever further decisions are made, or questions are asked. Just a note though, it’d be great if we had the ability to rename these versions.

Now that’s not to say it’s without it’s issues. Now time for some of the current (but fixable) negatives:

• As expected with new updates — it’s slightly buggy

We’re in software development, we know that bugs happen. There’s a few minor issues with Sketch Cloud, not so much the prototyping side. Currently when pushing design files to the cloud, any overrides made to symbols within Sketch (for example, to change a layer style quickly) do not translate into the Cloud. Instead, Cloud presents the designs in its raw state, so it will show any overrides as the original symbol instead. This can be worked around for now by just using multiple symbol management instead of overriding styles in our workflow, but eventually Cloud needs to be a true reflection of the design when it comes to having a shareable prototype.

• Transitions aren’t completely there… yet!

This is more of a personal gripe of mine rather than a negative, but coming away from prototyping-dedicated software such as Flinto and Marvel, I can’t help but feel like the available transitions are a little primitive. Past prototyping sites had subtle fades, screens moving into view (and seamlessly returning the other way) as well as the ability to quick link back to any view that was before it. Maybe in a few updates Sketch can make their transitioning options a bit smoother for polishing properties.

The recently launched beta of Inspector mode within Cloud.

So there we have it, my fresh take on prototyping within Sketch. It also doesn’t stop here, as Sketch is looking to take over other areas of our work process such as design handovers, development understanding and more. They’ve already begun these steps with the inspector beta, where users can click on any design asset within Sketch Cloud and it will display beneficial properties such as placement, colours, fonts etc. While that’s helpful, it’s currently missing a few functions that will further it greatly — asset exporting for example, which has been announced a little bit down the line in their roadmap of updates in 2020.

If Sketch can bring all of these elements of the product design process and seamlessly keep it within the same platform, it’s going to do wonders for the design community. It’s a really exciting year for designers, and of course for the dedicated team at Sketch.

Thanks for reading