Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UXchange

Whenever we work in a team comprehensive of different professional backgrounds is necessary to create a prototype that can answer from any possible perspective.

I have worked with a few different prototyping tools in the past few years and here I explain why, IMHO, Sketch is not the best tool to use for a prototyping phase that is still in process.

I will do this trying to investigate a few key points that made me reconsider the usage of Axure Software instead of Sketch:

Usability vs Attractiveness
Quick and dirty vs Detailed
A fast tool to talk to any professional
Error prevention
The soul of the experience

Of course, the two softwares are actually compatible: the problem I am trying to target is the moments in which they should be used.

Usability vs Attractiveness

Even Tony had to prototype

Sketch is amazing. Sketch allows you to do so much amazing stuff that you totally lose the important and essential part of our work: investigation and usability.

The immediate features that Axure provides (like adding cases and in-software interactions) let the designer understand the whole process and where to act in order to create something smooth and “so simple to use”.

This is what is all about: Clarity vs Simplicity.

We are in the age of complex environments and languages: things are not simple. Things need to be perceived as simple.
This come from a long and deep study of complexity.

Sketch makes things cool and so simple that actually, most of the times, don’t work so well if tried out into a fast prototyping session because we lost time in making things cool and not so functional.

Quick and dirty vs. Detailed

Better be straight to the point when prototyping

The more a prototype is detailed, the easier is to misunderstand it.
If another professional looks at your work, he won’t be able to be objective even if it is his job.

Disclaimer: when I talk about “details” I refer to all those sexy objects that make the prototype so cool, like fake profile pictures or pretty icons.

When something is sketched, is clear what its function is: understand weather what we created works or not.

Yes, Sketch makes you do that. But there are so many awesome features and plugins that distract us from our first mission.

Explain what you mean with a sketch

They don’t mean the software, they want a scheme, a wireframe of what you have in mind.

Axure is pretty good in this. It gives us what we need. No distraction and the necessity to be as much clear as we can.

A fast tool to talk to any professional

It always happens, right?

When we have to deal with developer and art directors or UI we have to talk to three different kind of species (a bit strong, true though).

The first look at your prototype as the Matrix, so they translate it into code and how that thing is going to work. They are the engineers that have to approve the architectural project.

The others look at your work into the more conventional design point of view. They are the people who shape those “technical” drawings into the most appealing and clearest possible solution, so that everyone in the world will be willing to pay for the same thing.

With Sketch we tend to enter a field which is not yet to be discussed -like why an icon instead of another and so on- and we also deliver something which might be incomplete of the most important informations.

Error prevention

Be ready to any possible scenario when you prototype

Lately, at work, I had to discuss about the errors prevention during a user flow. With Axure we can study those cases by using the software’s features and analyse different possibilities and solutions.

It is possible to draw and prototype them real time, while we design our project.

For example:
If we wanted to show to someone all the possible scenarios of a login/register procedure it would be pretty easy and fast with Axure.

I would work with features as dynamic panels states, cases and conditions in order to show what happens when a user input a wrong email or a correct one.

With sketch, well, it would take an extensive amount of time and more than one software. Actually, I am not even really sure this is possible.

The soul of the experience

We need to adapt to the phase of the project.

As User Experience designers (when we are lucky) we should focus on the soul of the experience. At first at least.

There are different moments in the design process flow: for everyone of those there is also a more appropriate software to use.

Axure (and similar) is the program in which we are able to experiment with IA and feasibility of our ideas.

Sketch is a step forward. It is not meant to do fast prototypes as they should be intended. Fast doesn’t mean incomplete.

There is a difference among fast and functional as for simplicity and clarity.

All in one software?

I know, strong words

Here I reach my conclusion, where I wish for a program that can adapt to all those necessities I talked previously about.

Would it be possible to have a software able to adapt to a specific phase of the project?

Maybe the reality of things is that we need different softwares for different moments.

In the end one of the biggest laws of UX is that less choices bring less distractions.

But what can I do? I am still a wonderer.

And I wonder if someone here does share this whole perspective.

UX rules,

Alberto

Why Sketch is not (yet) the killer software for UX was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why Sketch is not (yet) the killer software for UX

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