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

PROTOPIE

This video illustrates one of Protopie’s strengths, which is the ability to create closer to real experiences. It shows two instances of the same prototype, each running on its own device, but able to talk to each other. The intention was to mimic the kind of behaviour that might occur in a clinical setting with multiple receptionists managing patients arriving for and making new appointments – but this uses a quiz format, where the players can choose their question types (as available from  the 4000+ questions on the OpenTrivia Database ).

A question can only be answered by one of the two players and scores are penalised for incorrect answers. There is no need to answer every question. When a player has done their best they can see their own score, but when both are done, they see each others’ scores and can review the correct answers.

I think it is reasonable challenge to the other prototyping platforms to be able to create something like this – yet many many real world experiences (in healthcare especially, but elsewhere too) have exactly this kind of multi-person requirement.

This prototype is available to view (as a one player game) on cloud.protopie.io , but if you have access to Protopie Connect then you can download and run it as a two person game

Playing with time

A message sent to the current scene will be received by the object that sent it. But a message sent to Protopie Studio (Connect) will not be received by the pie that sent it. B ut what if there is nothing out there to respond to it?
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Moving between Figma and Protopie

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How to inspect variables inside a component

Even all-Scenes variables are not accessible inside a component. And this can lead to hard to find errors when a variable with the same name is used in a component, but its value is not sync'd with the scenes.
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Arrays and multiple parameters

Protopie seems limited since a message can be sent using only one value as a parameter. However, arrays (written as text strings and manipulated by parseJson) can be used for contexts where multiple parameters need to be passed.
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Sending messages to two places

Whilst it is important to be careful in sending messages to the right places, it is also very powerful to send a message to two different places at the same time (or maybe with a small delay).
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Use Components

It will often seem as though it will be faster to use individual elements than to use components, but in the end the time saving almost always goes the other way.
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Origami Studio, Figma and others
How do these other popular platforms compare?
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Good Prototyping Practice
IDEO's 3R prototyping principles from the late 1990s still apply - "Right, Rough, Rapid" but in the UX and UI space they are easily misunderstood.
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Why use Protopie?
There are many prototyping tools out there, so what makes Protopie special – how is it different?
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© 2023: David J Gilmore