Rough, Rapid, Right

A key principle for all protoyping in product design is to be rough, rapid and right.

Rough means not to build anymore than is necessary for the current purpose.

Rapid means moving fast and being prepared to throw the prototype away quickly, once it has achieved its purpose.

Right means ensuring that the rough prototype rapidly built is capable of addressing the unknowns and answering the critical question.

Some purposes of prototyping

Seeing how much can be fitted onto a screen and still be comfortably legible.
Exploring whether users interpret the various interactive elements appropriately.
Demonstrate that a flow (through the application) works and makes sense.
Providing colleagues with an understanding of what ‘Done’ might look and feel like.
Investigating whether users can navigate through the flow and complete their tasks.
Enabling customers to see what new features might really mean in their day-to-day usage.

Whichever of these (or numerous other)purposes fits your reasons for building a prototype, this should guide you in terms of what rough, rapid and right might mean for you and this should lead you to see what tool is most appropriate.

Check if Protopie Connect is present

If you are building a prototype that depends upon Protopie Connect then it is a good idea to start by checking if Connect is actually present.

Sending messages to two places

Whilst it is important to be careful in sending messages to the right places, it is also very powerful to send a message to two different places at the same time (or maybe with a small delay).

Receive and Assign hazard

Receiving a message, and then assigning a value and then writing a conditional based on that value is that something that is quite a normal, conceptual pattern – but in Protopie it will often not work as expected. This is because responses to Protopie triggers all happen simultaneously and not in the order written.

Origami Studio, Figma and others

How do these other popular platforms compare?

parseJson gives no error message

parseJson is.a very useful and powerful function, but it doesn't do all you might expect of it (yet, hopefully).

Distinctive initial variable values

It can sometimes be very helpful to use -99 and "null" for the initial values for your number and text variables.

Working with Components

Sending and receiving mismatched messages

You can send messages in different ways, but Protopie requires you to receive them in the matching way. A common (and easy) mistake is to send a message to a 'parent' while wanting to receive it from the current scene.

Using the wrong mental model for Protopie

Viewing variables within Components

Moving between Figma and Protopie

Distinctive initial variable values

Check if your other pie is present

Check if Protopie Connect is present