adaptive path » blog » david verba » Prototyping for Designers

I was at Rich Web Experience last week and Yahoo’s Bill Scott presented a session on his recently unveiled prototyping library. It’s called Protoscript and he’s written a blog post as well. Both of these sources get technical fairly quickly so the implications may not be immediately obvious to non-programmers. Even though Protoscript is still very much a work in progress and there’s some distance between it’s current state and Bill’s vision for it’s future, the opportunities it opens up are are exciting.

The driving force behind this library is Bill’s opinion that “Prototyping is too hard for non-techies”. I wouldn’t make quite the same blanket statement but I do agree that some of the most useful, effective prototyping approaches do require developer resources or developer assistance. These technical resources are not always readily available. Protoscript shifts the requirements and ultimately will allow designers with little or no actual coding expertise to rapidly prototype in an interesting way.

The Protoscript bookmarklet allows you ‘inject’ Ajax behaviors into existing web pages. That means you can start with an html mockup or a client’s existing site as a starting point and try all sorts of different approaches. Do you have a list of items somewhere on a web page? Want to see what it would be like if they were drag and drop elements? Want to see what it would look like if you could delete list elements and have them fade and disappear? Somebody asks to see what they would look like in some sort of accordion layout? Imagine being able to run through those 3 iterations in the space of 10 minutes. Now imagine being able to do that as a designer without a developer to help you.

Being able to get by without development resources will require the completion of the GUI interface Bill envisions but even in it’s current state, Protoscript could fundamentally change work flows. A designer and a developer can sit together over a common screen run through ideas in a much more lightweight way than they currently can. Or, in other words, Protoscript shifts this type of prototyping from a multi-day email interchange with the IT department to something that feels more like sketching quickly on whiteboard.