Devfacto

My time at Devfacto was an intensive course in UX design practice and process. My duties were many and varied, ranging from working with mobile app developers producing application icons & assets, to developing prototypes, to on-site user interviews.

One project in particular really drove home how reusable components could speed up prototype iteration. Prior to this, I’d only used Photoshop for building mockups and wireframes. I was an old hand at Photoshop and could move decently fast, but at the wireframing stage, speed is of the essence in order to get your user flow ideas into a testable state and Photoshop was clearly not the right tool for this job.

Pixel perfection is not what’s needed at this point.

It was here that a colleague introduced me to Balsamiq. After getting over the default “Comic Sans-y” look, I discovered the power of saving chunks of my wireframe for one screen to reuse on sub-screens or similar screens. Components are table-stakes in design tools these days, but at the time it was revelatory. I was able to wireframe around 40 different screens (some not all that different, let’s be honest) in about two days, easily about 10x what I was able to do before.

Not just a good number of screens, but exported as a PDF with clickable areas, this was now a fairly robust interactive prototype. With this we were able to present the client with a deliverable they could use to really get a feel for using the application, and had time to include some low-fidelity concepts for mobile, tablet, and desktop to start the look-and-feel discussion.