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An Overview of Prototyping and Interactive Design

“In the broadest sense, all kinds of design artifacts are prototypes. Pencil sketches, blocks of wood, storyboards, wireframes, foam-core models, pixel-perfect state renderings, clickable demos, and functioning production code are all strategies for representing a thing being designed. However, in the world of interaction design, we usually reserve the term for ways of representing interactivity—not just the form but also behavior. For the purposes of this article, therefore, I’m going to focus on things that both look (at least somewhat) like the thing being designed and simulate a response to human actions (clicks, taps, selection, and navigation), even if the simulations are crude or fairly limited…”

From Adobe’s Developer Connection. This is a clearly written, easy to understand, overview of prototyping for interactive design, what prototyping is, how it’s done, and its limitations. Includes a link to an interesting article about how to use Adobe’s Fireworks to create prototypes.

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