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Prototyping tools in 2021: are they meeting our needs?
The ability to design interactively continues to increase as software and hardware become more advanced but is it evolving fast enough and in the right way?
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I’ve been thinking about prototyping a lot recently. Both in terms of how it has evolved over the last few years and its role within design.
We now have tools that give us the capability to imagine our designs beyond static graphics and simple click-thru’s and it’s changed how we design.
Gone are static wireframes as prototyping basic flows with magic animations becomes super-simple and commonplace. Now it's just a matter of designing up some screens in Figma and connecting them and bam, you have a working piece of software that you can instantly interact with.
The more we can prototype, the more we want to prototype
Of course, we want more. What was a high-fidelity prototype five years ago is now a basic one; we moved on and are now creating ever more realistic prototypes that are indistinguishable from real apps. In fact, I would say that’s increasingly becoming the norm but are the prototyping tools we have today keeping up with our needs?