<p>Published on <a href="http://ift.tt/2nak6an">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> mysticpixels </p>
<h4>Disruptive innovation in Prototyping products</h4>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2nvnQqn"></p>
<p>Compared to early years when ‘prototyping’ was still an industrial vocabulary, today the quality of prototyping tools available to a UX designer has undergone unbelievable transformation and ‘prototyping’ has found its place as a vital stage in digital product design.</p>
<p>While UX designers now are spoilt by choices of tools, the rise of prototyping has opened up a vast playground for a ‘crowd’ of prototyping tools, not to mention the ‘copycats’ and ‘just another prototyping tool’ groups.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2obVTCp">The Prototyping Playground</p>
<p>In this article, we’ll explore how all these new tools have been able to pop up and disrupt this fast paced market. Why are there so many options, and is there chance that one tool will ultimately prevail? I’ll start by sharing my own experience with these tools, covering what can causes people to switch between competitors so often.</p>
<h4>4 Years Is Too Long to Stick with One Tool</h4>
<p>If I were to pick my prototyping tool of choice around 4 years ago, without a second thought ‘<a href="https://www.axure.com/">AxureRP</a>’ would be it! For me, this was by far the best tool available in the market which could help me weave complex interactions to the extend of creating a full-blown interactive prototype of a complete system. But, 4 years is too long to stick with one tool, and its been a while since I have fired up AxureRP Pro in my MacBook for prototyping something new.</p>
<blockquote><p>Although the rules of the game has not changed, the playground has changed its terrain radically with collaboration, interoperability, SaaS, mobility and innovation becoming the USPs with new players bringing about ‘Disruption’.</p></blockquote>
<p>As a user, my transition from Axure to a group of other tools I believe is an after-effect of the ‘Innovative Disruption’ model adopted by new players in the market. Next I will try to unravel what made me abandon a tool which helped me steer a number of key assignments to success, and move towards a couple of relatively new kids on the block!</p>
<h3>The Incumbent (The Bully)</h3>
<p>The picture below sums up my perspective on Axure as a prototyping tool — easily the most extensive and heavy-weight solution for interactive prototyping.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2nvp8lr">A big bully in Prototyping Playground</p>
<h4>What I loved about Axure</h4>
<ol>
<li>Ability to replicate literally any kind of complex interactions using dynamic panels, conditional flows and event-based interactions, which works right inside a browser!</li>
<li>‘Axshare’ — the cloud-based prototype sharing mechanism.</li>
<li>Ability to annotate heavily using notes.</li>
<li>Ability to easily replicate complex interaction patterns to multiple pages by copying / pasting on to the interaction panel.</li>
</ol>
<p>Although these were some key features that I loved and benefitted the most, I always felt Axure was being a ‘heavy’ tool which could have been much better in terms of connecting design workflows together seamlessly. So far so good, with no serious competition!</p>
<blockquote><p>Another competition <a href="https://www.irise.com/">i-Rise</a> IMHO missed the train due to unrealistic pricing options and too much focus on niche user segments and extending its arms to requirement management, analytics, user story management and so on…</p></blockquote>
<p>However, as time has moved on, a disruptive set of smaller tools, each focusing on a specialized area of the prototyping workflow have emerged. They even play well together, meaning users can pick and choose different tools to achieve their goals. This has somewhat lead to the downfall of large tools like Axure.</p>
<h3>The Disruptor(s)</h3>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2occNRo">Sketch + InVision</p>
<p>It wasn’t until few years ago <a href="http://ift.tt/1Ls7nHW"><strong>Sketch</strong></a> caught my attention, and I should say I am glued to it since!</p>
<blockquote><p>Being an ardent fan of <a href="http://ift.tt/Ii817v">Photoshop</a> for around 12 years, it is quite ‘startling’ to realize how Sketch has transformed my workflows and also took my digital authoring (hi-fidelity wireframes / concepts / visual communication artifacts) capabilities to a complete new level of standard!</p></blockquote>
<h4>The Advantage of Tools that Play Well Together</h4>
<p>While Sketch raised my bar in digital assets authoring, most of the times my work involves creating ‘Proof of Concepts’ and communicating my ideas to customers / stakeholders with the help of prototypes. Axure never allowed me to make use of Sketch in a seamless manner. There was no interoperability between these 2 tools, and I could no longer capitalize on my quick sketch turnarounds, as I either had to import images from Sketch onto Axure, or create the whole interface using Axure from scratch!</p>
<p><a href="http://ift.tt/Milx48"><strong>Invision</strong></a><strong> </strong>was consistently hitting the bulls-eye at this time, and it didn’t take me long enough to get my hands dirty with this tool which was known for its collaboration features. What bought me in completely was its strong integration with a long list of tools and platforms, including Sketch and Photoshop! Although its interoperability with Sketch was the feature that helped me to augment the power of sketch, it is not the only killer feature that set Invision apart…</p>
<h4>What made Sketch + Invision work for me</h4>
<ol>
<li>The seamless way both of these tools were integrated with a string on plugins (<a href="http://ift.tt/1pZWfMs">Craft</a> — the suite of plugins from <a href="http://ift.tt/2aM0fu1">Invision labs</a>, walks away with the top spot!)</li>
<li>Literally unlimited possibilities to extend sketch to your mind’s imagination with the help of the plugin <a href="http://ift.tt/2eprIWv">ecosystem</a> (<a href="http://ift.tt/2ntFTNR">Sketchappsources</a>, <a href="http://ift.tt/1AmxNWk">Sketchtoolbox</a> are just two out of the countless resources out there!)</li>
<li>The powerful concept of ‘Symbols’ in Sketch makes it the default choice while authoring assets for huge enterprise-level design systems (Get an idea by reading <a href="http://bit.ly/2nCXZxX">this</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/2nD0YX4">this</a> and <a href="http://bit.ly/2nCYCYs">this</a>)</li>
<li>Handing off the UX design to the engineering team is not just about files / artifacts, its about successfully planting the seeds of your thought-process to a different team so that they can carry it forward to the finished product. <a href="http://bit.ly/2nD2Hf3">Inspect</a> feature of the Craft suite of plugins takes this head-ache away from me in style!</li>
<li>No other tool at the moment has been able to get to the heart of collaboration while prototyping, like Invision has.</li>
<li><a href="http://bit.ly/2nCOf6W">Version control</a> is another gem which has saved me countless man-hours.</li>
<li><a href="http://bit.ly/2nD60mr">Design driven workflow</a> brings UX process to the center-stage, and the transparency in the workflow plays a major role in bringing all the players in the team to the same ground.</li>
</ol>
<h4>What Happens Next?</h4>
<p>Once tools such as InVision and Sketch grow in terms of users and therefore revenue, they can start tackling new problems, and introduce additional features. It’s a form of ‘Disruptive Innovation’, whereby small products can grow into large companies. Let’s explore this next, as it’s key to what is going to define the prototyping landscape of the future:</p>
<h3>Disruptive Innovation</h3>
<blockquote><p>Disruption describes a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>While the incumbent businesses exceeds the expectations of a certain segment of user-base by focusing on a niche / profitable group of users and ignoring other users, disruptive entrants starts small by focusing on those ignored user base and steadily surpasses the incumbent by gradually providing innovative functionalities and captures the mainstream business, eventually catapulting the incumbents into the depths of disruption!</p></blockquote>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2oc946h">This diagram explains how the path of an incumbent and a disruptor will eventually cross each other in the long run, spelling the death knell for the incumbent. Point to be noted here is that often the disruptor’s performance is much lower than the incumbent’s to start with! — Courtesy: Harvard Business Review (<a href="http://bit.ly/2k5On9v">http://bit.ly/2k5On9v</a>)</p>
<h4>Let me connect the dots…</h4>
<p>Lets visualize <strong>Axure as the Incumbent player</strong> here and the combo of <strong>Sketch + Invision as the disruptors.</strong></p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Axure’s user base: </strong>Axure caters to a wide user-base<strong> </strong>ranging from Interaction designers / Information architects / UX Architects looking to create complex interactive prototypes, to professionals creating clickable prototypes trying to gather preliminary design feedback before going hi-fi.</li>
<li><strong>Axure focusses on a user segment, ignoring another: </strong>While Axure went behind its most profitable users<strong> </strong>— ‘the ones looking to create complex interactive prototypes’ by adding and enhancing its interactive prototyping capabilities, there were a segment of users who belonged to the ‘Low end of the market’<strong> </strong>— Hi-fidelity prototypers looking to create prototypes with basic interactivity, whom they ignored … only to realize that it was a bad move!</li>
<li><strong>Disruption gets started:</strong> The combo of Sketch and Invision (although they followed individual paths) was perfectly poised to target this segment of users which Axure ignored, and they slowly captured that market by providing a great platform which was cheap and more fulfilling — Sketch went on to become the new kid on the block in the graphic authoring landscape with a competitive pricing model and an innovative workflow based tool, and Invision brought collaboration to the heart of their SaaS based tool and enabled users to create hi-fidelity prototypes with basic interactions!</li>
<li><strong>Disruptors goes mainstream: </strong>While innovation combined with cheaper pricing model and aggressive marketing strategy expanded the disruptors’ user base, they were tirelessly working towards improving the quality of their service and capitalized on collaboration, Interoperability and the power of open-source (plugin ecosystem). Craft-Sync, Real data generators, Cloud based storage, Inspect feature, Version history mode and recently ‘<a href="http://ift.tt/2nbow1u">Freehand</a>’ are all a result of their joint journey towards capturing the mainstream user-base, which they eventually did in style!</li>
</ol>
<p>Here is how the diagram looks like for the disruptive journey of Sketch+Invision</p>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2nve4Vk"></p>
<p>Riding on the wave of Interoperability, Sketch and Invision still continues to innovate on ways to improve workflows and standard of digital product design teams.</p>
<h4>More Disruptors and How They Could Grow</h4>
<p>Other disrupters include tools such as <a href="http://marvelapp.com">Marvel</a>, who even let you record prototypes from <em>within</em> Sketch:</p>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2obQUBz"><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2nvgKlH"></p>
<p>Beginning as a very simple tool that enabled users to make static wireframes interactive, they’ve also carefully added features like the one shown above, to become a more powerful option.</p>
<p>There are many more still, and I look forward to explore the next disruptors in this arena — it will be interesting to see how the future of digital design process shapes up with the kind of innovation and competition around the tools and services!</p>
<p><em>What happens when these disrupters grow in size? Do they themselves eventually become a large incumbent product too?</em></p>
<blockquote><p>Definitely this is the best time to be an experience designer, and am happy about it 🙂</p></blockquote>
<p><em>Thanks to </em><a href="http://ift.tt/2oc1vfN"><em>prototypr.io</em></a><em> for suggesting some great edits to make the article make better sense…</em></p>
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<hr>
<p><a href="http://ift.tt/2obTirY">The Bully in the Prototyping Playground</a> was originally published in <a href="http://ift.tt/2cAqCpx">Prototyping: From UX to Front End</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>


The Bully in the Prototyping Playground

Disruptive innovation in Prototyping products

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