Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Joanna Ngai Credit: Invision Studio

A guide to the landscape of prototyping in 2018

For this edition delving into the ecosystem of prototyping tools, let’s take a look at newer motion design tools and others with unique feature sets, so you can improve your design workflow from crafting your initial ideas to handing them off for development.

Among many newer tools there’s an increasing emphasis on collaboration through the use of multi-player editing, design libraries and improving integration with development needs. Every tool seeks to be an all-in-one solution for your design needs — let’s see how they compare.

Invision Studio

Screen design tool + animation features. The nice about Invision that could be beneficial is that it’s home to a suite of useful plugins and tools (like Wake), which might be nicely integrated in Invision Studio’s experience. Animation is timeline based and offer extra options such as duration and delay. Currently Mac-only.

Credit: Invision Studio

Phase

Phase is a relatively new prototyping tool that takes a different approach to animation based around interaction building blocks vs. timeline animation or copying artboards/linking them. They also have a component based approach to properties and elements and features exporting customized code. Offers Sketch import.

Credit: PhaseCredit: Phase

Flow

A prototyping tool that animates differences between artboards. Offer Sketch import. Export animations into code.

Credit: Flow

ProtoPie

For anyone feeling nostalgic over Pixate, check out ProtoPie! It’s a prototyping tool for Mac and Windows that animation based off of an straight forward t trigger interaction model. Something unique to ProtoPie is including the use of sensors built in smartphones to create prototypes that are more complex than on-screen prototypes.

Offers Sketch/Adobe XD/Figma import.

Credit: ProtoPie

Conclusion

I hope exploring these tools helps you prototype faster, smarter and easier. If you’d like to learn more, take a look at the popular prototyping tools in the past few years below.

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Thanks for reading! Feel free to check out my design work or new UX handbook, available on Amazon.

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Designer’s Guide to Prototyping [2018 edition] was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Designer’s Guide to Prototyping [2018 edition]

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