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  • Protopie and Figma
  • Protopie Tips
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  • Protopie and Figma
  • Protopie Tips
  • Experience Prototyping

PROTOPIE

Origami Studio, Figma and others

In the spirit of crafting the right prototype it is important to look at various UX prototyping tools so as to understand which tool might be best for the prototype you need at any one moment, for some given purpose.

With Protopie one of our first major uses of it was to to craft a prototype which put a collection of different software projects together as one single experience. This allowed our development teams to walk through it and gain a clearer idea of how their piece of the puzzle fitted into the bigger picture. This proved so successful that these walk-throughs became a regularly scheduled event.

If your purpose is to show a product manager quickly what a new screen or feature might lookalike, then Figma is probably a much more appropriate tool.

Origami Studio has the big advantage of being free and it is powerful in some very interesting ways. Its underlying mental model is much closer to Protopie than it is Adobe XD or Figma, but the programming concepts are not the easiest to grasp. I don’t see any way to run the same Origami prototype on two devices at the same time, but it does allow much more the user to craft their own experience rather than follow a script.

Other tools (Azure, UX Pin, for example) try to meet the need of bringing design closer to developers rather than closer to users – they can be used for user testing, but their strengths lie more in the linkage from design to development.

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© 2023: David J Gilmore