When it comes to mobile app prototyping or building your first MVP, you might not know how to get the job done, especially as a non-designer without proper software, or support of a digital product development company to prototype an app.
Prototyping Features Prototype while you design, and vice versa Bring your ideas to life in animated prototypes. Test concepts earlier and more often. Quickly add functionality to your app with our click and edit app builder. It makes prototyping a breeze and allows you to rapidly experiment with new ideas and designs. We have a real time app previewer in our app builder that updates instantly as you make changes in the editor. What is an online prototype maker? An online prototype maker is a tool that many web designers use to create mockups of user interface designs for software applications or websites. Many professionals use online prototype makers to help plan the navigation, layout and information architecture of an application. React Studio is a rich design environment that gives you full control over high-level aspects of an app's design. In React Studio you don't draw a picture of a checkbox. You place a real checkbox, decide how it should fit in the layout, then connect it to some real data, make it interactive. In other words: create real apps, not just drawings. Sketch is a lightweight MacBook based UI/UX design tool for modern app designers. Sketch is more like Adobe Photoshop but it’s built mainly for app prototyping and has one of the highest share in the wireframing and prototyping space. The download size is about 20 megabyte, it doesn’t use too much system resources, it exports assets very fast.
Prototyping isn’t so hard, especially if you follow best practices and toolset adjusted to your skills.
You already know that you should always start with an MVP, not with building a team.
In this article, we are going to take a look at how and with which tools you can prototype an app as a non-developer/designer.
So, let’s begin.
What are the benefits of prototyping an application?
Did you know that prototyping an app can help you not only turn your idea into tangible mockups, but even save you money?
Prototyping an app gives you many more benefits like:
- Share your concept with friends, co-founders or even investors
- Save money by showing a remote software development team a “ready-to-code” mockup/wireframe/prototype
- Save money on designer by sharing with him a “ready-to-design” wireframes/mockups
- Be sure about what exactly you would like to build
- Gather feedback from customers
To prototype your first app you don’t have to be a designer – Use ready to use (and often free) User Interfaces and look for inspirations for your mobile app prototyping.
To prototype your first app you don’t have to be a developer – To animate UI and connect views you created, but you need the right tools to do it.
All that knowledge on how to prototype an app as a non-designer you will find right here.
What tools to use for app prototyping?
#Paper prototyping tools
No brainer, don’t have to use any extraordinary pro software. You can start right away without any special skills. It’s cheap, fun and enables you to turn your idea into tangible product prototype.
There are a few tools that can help you:
- Free sketch templates for web, mobile and tablet platforms – sketchappsources.com
- Offline prototyping with stencile – uistencils.com
- Make your sketches interactive. Just make photos of your sketches and connect them with each other by setting actions between them and you can get “app like feeling” with this app popapp.in
#Software to prototype apps
The fastest and the most stable way to develop a good design is still by using a desktop app. Try those:
- Yes, you can make a working prototype with animation with this software. Even the design is not a problem with those two. Here you can find great guides on how to prototype an app with Keynote.
- Just made for UI. A tool is similar to use as Keynote or PowerPoint, but have a way more great features and plugins dedicated for UI/UX designers.
- Free desktop app to prototype an app for each possible platform. Full of free widgets, easy to share and collaborate with other users. Not very popular software, but straight-forward to use.
- Seems to be a photoshop killer for UI design. All-in-one tool to prototype a web or mobile app. Extremely easy and fast to use. Replicate existing elements by dragging the borders or change images by drag-and-drop without any manual adjustment.
#Cloud software to prototype apps
You can prototype an app in software, which is accessible via your browser. There are some of the pretty good apps on the market to do it:
- Is a design platform that makes it easy to go from static design to fully animated prototypes – without any code. Everyone can comment directly on designs. Awesome to share/modify designs in real-time. Create your designer in UXPin or upload from Sketch/Photoshop
- Currently, the leader in the category of prototyping, wireframing and workflow platform for web and mobile app prototyping. Most advanced cloud software on the market.
- Similar to UXPin, but focused on mobile apps. You can create, animate, share with customers a fully interactive high-fidelity prototypes that look and work like a mobile app. No coding required.
- Clean, easy to use, not to overloaded with tools prototyping tool for apps. Only one which is free to use for unlimited projects.
- Is a rapid wireframing tool. It’s more about functionality and getting feedback from users, not beautiful UI. It reproduces the experience of sketching on a whiteboard but using a computer.
- With a strong focus on simplicity and communication, Fluid UI is a smart prototyping tool. Equipped with built-in high and low fidelity component libraries, live team collaboration, device previews and video presentations, making it a top-notch solution for designers, product managers and founders.
App prototyping – Look for inspiration like Picasso!
You don’t have to be a designer to create your first prototype. There are a few ways to “fake it, till you make it” as a non-designer. “Steal” existing designs, but try to copy only the elements that you really like and connect them together by adding your own style.
It’s the fastest way to learn something new by copying somebody, who did it correctly and add your own sense of style.
#Use existing templates and UI
Download and adjust free or paid UI to your needs. You can find plenty of templates, UIs for websites and mobile apps for desired software. Here you can find great resources:
- Freebies for Sketch: sketchappsources.com
- Mockups, UI, UI elements: ui8.net
- Free stock photos: pexels.com
- Icons: flaticon.com
- Fonts:fontsquirrel.com and google.com
#Get inspired by other designers
Look for designers and designs that you really like and try to recreate elements from them.
Where can you find great inspirations? Here is a list:
- UI only inspirations like pttrns.com or collectui.com
- Platform for designers like behance.net or dribbble.com
- Pinterest: pinterest.com
Final word – Development
As you can see, you can create the first prototype of your product without having a team or being a non-designer. The toolset that could be used in this case is not complex at all. Plus, the internet is full of free templates, user interfaces to download and inspirations that can take your web or mobile app prototype on the next level.
Now, when you have a ready, good enough looking and tested by users prototype – let’s build it!
First, decide if this should be the web or mobile app, if you already decided which way to choose, then let’s talk about how we can help you to change your prototype into working app. Time up app uninstall from mac.
Resources:
![Making Making](/uploads/1/3/4/2/134202209/256243942.jpg)
In the process of iPhone and Android application development, wireframing is extremely important. At the first stage, an initial idea becomes a quick sketch to share with teammates, while later a UI/UX designer can use more sophisticated tools to create a full-featured prototype with transitions, links, and screenflows to model user experience. Wireframing tools are what lets you to translate what you’ve imagined into something more real, something that can be seen and understood by the people around, so choosing the right tool is crucial in creating a smooth workflow.
In the past years, we’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of wireframing solutions, from the most simple to very complex, from standalone apps to web-based editors, so now it’s difficult to navigate this market without a guide or at least a starting point. That’s why we’ve selected some of the most useful prototyping tools for everyone to choose from, ranging from sketch-drawing web apps that don’t require any special skills to work with to feature-rich (though often expensive) desktop suites with all kinds of instruments a UI/UX specialist might need in their work.
Check out some of the best examples of each type of prototyping tools, and if you think something is missing, feel free to add your favorite solution in the comment section.
1. Axure RP.
An elegant and powerful wireframing tool with desktop apps for Mac and PC, Axure is what people at Stanfy are using for creating mobile app prototypes.
Axure RP allows users to create interactive HTML prototypes not only for any mobile device, but also for pages and web apps. It’s pretty intuitive and employs simple drag-and-drop interface and conditional logic to put together usage scenarios.
Price tag: $289 to $589 per license, free trial available.
2. Proto.io.
This web-based tool is a full-featured platform for UI wireframing, one of the most popular on the market. In addition to friendly user interface, Proto includes a powerful annotating tool, which can be used by designer’s clients or colleagues for review and discussion.
Another convenient feature is that you can test your mobile prototypes on a real device with Proto.io Player app available for iOS and Android.
Price tag: starting at $24 per month, free trial available.
3. Fluid UI.
Fluid is another popular web-based prototyping tool with more than 200,000 users all over the world, which include giants like Xerox, Motorola, and eBay, according to the project’s website. It sports a visual linking system that makes it easier to create screenflows, as well as collaboration tools and a mockup players for iOS and Android.
The web application boasts more than 2,000 ready-made UI widgets for prototypes for iOS, Android and Windows 8.
Price tag: from free to $49 per month.
4. Wireframe.cc.
This minimalist wireframing tool is a perfect one for newcomers to the world of UI/UX design, as well as for those who only need to create simple prototypes in a clean and clutter-free environment.
Wireframe has only three simple app prototype templates for web, tablet and smartphone (or rather iPad and iPhone), and a set of pre-made elements. There’s also a smart suggestion engine that’s supposed to read your thoughts and guess what you’re trying to write.
Price tag: from free to $99 per month (for unlimited number of users and projects).
5. Omnigraffle.
Though not an exclusively mobile app wireframing tool, Omnigraffle is widely used by UI/UX designers for this purpose. This powerful diagram building platform available as a standalone app for Mac and iPad employs layer-based mechanics familiar to everyone who has worked with traditional graphic suites like Photoshop.
Omnigraffle users also have access to a huge library of pre-made stencils that include everything from Google’s Material Design icons to Apple Watch templates.
Price tag: from $99.99 to $199.99 for Mac and $49.99 for iPad, free trial available.
6. Balsamiq.
Another simplistic wireframing solution, Balsamiq is a great tool for quick prototyping. The app is made to be as effortless and intuitive as possible, and gets off the way of the user’s imagination.
The creators of Balsamiq admit that they limited the interactivity options on purpose to let users make mockups as they would with pen and paper, so you’ll need to figure out if you like this style of wireframing your apps by getting a free trial.
Price tag: $79 for Windows, Mac, and Linux; $12 per month for web app subscription, free trial available.
7. Just in Mind.
Marketed as “one application prototyping solution for all screens,” Just in Mind is a wireframing platform for Windows and Mac that allows you to create responsive websites and apps for phones and tablets with ease and comfort. You can define gesture transactions for mobile apps and test them on actual devices running Android and iOS.
Designers get access to a wide range of widgets they can group in libraries and use in their mobile prototypes.
Price tag: from free to $19 or $29 per month or $495 for a perpetual license.
8. UXPin.
Making An App Prototype
A “UX design tool built by UX designers,” UXPin looks like a properly balanced solution somewhere in between rapid prototyping software and huge feature-rich platforms that are often hard to explore and make sense of.
With UXPin, you can prototype a smartphone or tablet app, as well as a responsive website. It also provides users with a possibility of real-time collaboration and feedback.
Price tag: from $15 to $40 per user per month, free trial available. How to kill a app in mac.
9. Moqups.
This sketch-style web-based wireframing tool is somewhat similar to Wireframe and Balsamiq in its simplicity, allowing users to create prototypes with the speed of thought using a bunch of ready-made stencils and templates for iPhone and iPad.
Moqups’ vector-based editor allows to connect pages with links and hotspots to create screenflows, as well as export mockups as PDF documents.
Price tag: from free to $50 per month (for unlimited number of users).
Prototype App Builder
10. Marvel.
Last but not least, Marvel is a service that lets designers create application prototypes for smartphones, tablets, web or even gaming devices. It works with Dropbox and supports PSD files, so there’s no need to convert them into other formats.
In addition to the web-based prototyping platform, users are offered an iPhone app that allows to “animate” sketches drawn on paper into interactive wireframes.
Price tag: free, paid “Pro” version coming soon.
That’s about it, and we hope that everyone has found something that resonates with their way of work, as at the end of the day this is the most important quality of any wireframing solution. Probably more than one of the described tools can find its place on computers of different team members in a mobile application development company. And if you still think that the best tools to draw an early prototype are pencil and paper, then so be it — especially given that there are tools that allow to smartly digitize such sketches to share with people around.
Prototype App Maker
Happy prototyping!
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If you have any questions about UI/UX Design, get in touchwith us. We would love to hear from you!