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.

Playing with time

A message sent to the current scene will be received by the object that sent it. But a message sent to Protopie Studio (Connect) will not be received by the pie that sent it. B ut what if there is nothing out there to respond to it?

How to inspect variables inside a component

Even all-Scenes variables are not accessible inside a component. And this can lead to hard to find errors when a variable with the same name is used in a component, but its value is not sync'd with the scenes.

Keep trigger and response names visible

It is very important to annotate your code with what it is actually doing, but keeping the trigger and response names helps someone new to the project (or you in three month's time.

Put code inside components

Protopie code can get complex and hard to follow surprisingly quickly. Putting as much code as possible within your components can keep your main scenes simpler and cleaner.

Good Prototyping Practice

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.

Using the wrong mental model for Protopie

Most prototyping tools for designers use the frame-by-frame, or multiple dartboards model. But Protopie is much closer to a developer's object-oriented model of an application UI.

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?

Sending messages to two places

Receive and Assign hazard

Distinctive initial variable values

Keep trigger and response names visible

Sending a message to another scene

Use Components