As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve started work on a PerformaGo prototype.
Had I been working on it this time last year, the prototyping process would have been much less AI assisted than it is right now. Love it or loathe it, AI continues to change and improve at pace.
I’m generally trying to avoid talking about specific tools I’m using as part of any prototyping/build. I don’t want it to look like I’m strongly endorsing (or criticising) a particular tool.
In the world of software development, I think it’s different strokes for different folks.
A tool that works brilliantly for one person in one specific context may be a disaster for another person in a different context. So, just because I find something useful/awful in my context doesn’t mean that will be true for someone else.
Anyway, having said all that, I will mention that I’m using Figma to do the prototyping. Just because of how much it has changed in a little less than 12 months.
When I started using it last year to do some basic screen layouts, it felt very much like any other visual design tool.
Fast forward to now and I find myself using its AI assistant, which is enabling me to create what I’m going to call a clickable wire-frame prototype.
I’m sure there’s probably a snappier term for this in the tech bro world. I just haven’t encountered it yet.
What I’m describing is a prototype that behaves like a live application. You can click around in it, enter and erase data in fields. It just doesn’t save anything after each instance of use/demonstration because, of course, there is no back end.
However, from the point of view of demonstrating flow, usability it’s brilliant.
From the point of view of working through what you need in a given mode, i.e., what a screen or modal should look like and how you want it to behave, it feels like magic.
I’m totally bowled over by the fact that I can create something as sophisticated as I have without the need to write a single line of code.
What I could have achieved this time last year without an AI assistant, would have a been rather different. A wire frame in the conventional sense of the term. In other words, a series of flat, two-dimensional screen layouts that you would mentally connect together and (more or less) imagine how they work as a coherent whole.
What has been so much easier building this ‘3D’ wire frame is the ability to work through the nuance of the user interface. How it connects to the deeper cognitive processing that the support elements enable.
This is helping me to ensure the support elements are about just that (i.e., support) and are not simply more training disguised as support.
This is something I want to write about in the last and final piece of this ‘Big Shift’ series of posts.
Until next time…
