Prototyping User(s) Experiences

Prototyping is a key step in any design process, but it tends to be focused on the things that can be built (the architecture, the components, the user interface) but much neglected is the practice of prototyping the experiences that users will have together with the product or system. This becomes even more important as we move into a world of systems containing AI algorithms.

Protopie is a very valuable tool for prototyping experiences that embrace multiple people and multiple products (maybe software and hardware) or multiple interfaces.

Sending a message to another scene

This is a very easy mistake to make – sending a message to be picked up by a component, but one that you have in fact placed into a different scene. Although you can send to a different pie, you can't send to a different scene.

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).

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.

Working with Components

The wrong variable type

This pitfall is not a big deal, but it can waste you time as you try to track down why your variable seems to have the wrong value (or no value). It can also bite you in a formula where your variable is of the wrong type for the formula.

Why use Protopie?

There are many prototyping tools out there, so what makes Protopie special – how is it different?

Use Components

It will often seem as though it will be faster to use individual elements than to use components, but in the end the time saving almost always goes the other way.

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.

Use Variables

How to inspect variables inside a component

Sending and receiving mismatched messages

Distinctive initial variable values

Receive and Assign hazard

Using the wrong mental model for Protopie