Why do UI Design & Prototyping?

• Your project is about to start or has entered the visual-design or the coding step, but your project team lacks a detailed, validated UI design to work from.
• As a result, visual designers and programmers will be forced to make UI decisions piecemeal as they go along.
• But UI is a specialized pre-visual-design skill that most visual designers and programmers lack.
• It cannot be done effectively at the same time as visual design or programming.
• Lacking a detailed, validated UI design is a recipe for terrible usability problems and a tremendous amount of unnecessary, time-consuming, expensive rework.
• UI’s and the functionality their communicate are usually too complex and fluid to define in static documents, especially for the purposes of stakeholder review and feedback, therefore you need an integrated online prototype that can be played with, inspected, annotated, updated, in real time, and spit out formal specifications automatically, as needed

Methodology

• Design a fully-interactive, dynamic prototype of your website or online-product/application. I can accomodate all emerging technologies, including the following
  • Smart mobile phones & hand-helds
  • Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
  • Social networking
  • GIS-based maps with superimposed, dynamic information
  • Convergent media (e.g., VoIP, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text)
  • Cameras with dynamic-information overlays (also known as “Augmented Reality”

• Includes individual screens, their elements, rules, and specifications.
• May include a technical proof-of-concept, if needed.
• Use advanced interactive online-prototyping tools with built-in review & revision capabilities.
• Produce easy-to-use, functional-specification documents, reports, & annoted UI screen-shots.
• Producs a UI design that is faithful to the product strategy, conceptual design, and specifications

Benefits of This Approach

1. A UI that allows users to perform all the tasks needed to achieve their aims
2. A UI that makes it quick and easy for users to perform these tasks effectively
3. Permits user-group testing and revisions prior to expensive coding & testing
4. Prototype allows you to try out and validate the UI, versus flowcharts & descriptions
5. Saves client’s time in deciding on and communicating changes needed
6. Avoids long, difficult, unproductive, and grueling review-meetings
7. Visual designers & programmers get exactly what they need to do a good job efficiently
8. Ensures a design that will work well with the chosen technology-platform
9. Contributes to code that has fewer bugs & is easier to test, maintain, and extend
10. Prevents unanticipated expansion of scope and going over budget

Read my Case Study.