The inherent contradiction ...
IDEO’s 3R prototyping principles from the late 1990s still apply – “Right, Rough, Rapid” but in the UX and UI space they are easily misunderstood.
My experience, over many years, is that there is an inherent contradiction in these 3Rs. To get something Right seems to exclude being Rough. And Rapid always seems like a challenge.
The first part go good practice is to understand that Right does not the right and final design – rather it refers to the idea that a prototype should be Right for its intended purpose.
Many people use artboard-based prototyping tools very successfully because their primary purpose is to show a colleague what the UI looks like and how it behaves. But such an approach breaks down if one’s purpose is user testing.
Right for user testing requires something that may not be visually perfect, but which enables the user to see the whole promise and explore it in context.
One may also need a prototype to be Right in terms of implementation and to help people explore the speed at which interactions need to happen.
Why Protopie?
My enthusiasm for Protopie stems from the user testing aspect – most of my content here assumes that we are building prototypes to help get better feedback from users. In the context of healthcare apps for clinical use, this means enabling users to collaborate with each other as they would in real work, instead of asking them to look at their UI without anyone else involved.
Also, Protopie’s components and libraries enable one to move Rapidly without building things from scratch. And they also enable one to move gradually from very Rough to very refined – focussing on interactions and experience first and visual details later.