EasyPrototype occupies a design niche somewhere between the cocktail napkin and
the fancy Visio or PowerPoint mockup of your next software project's user interface.
The idea is to create a user interface prototype with some dynamic behavior, but
not one that can possibly be mistaken for finished software, and then use it as
a tool to drive to agreement with clients and other stakeholders on a project. Produced
by the folks behind ExtremePlanner,
EasyPrototype makes it very simple to get a quick storyboard put together, and doesn't
include any extra features to tempt you to waste time putting lipstick on it.
The basic workflow here is simple. You start with pictures of your user interface,
saved as JPG, GIF, or BMP (I would have liked to see PNG on the list too, but it's
not supported in the current release). These might be screenshots of Photoshop or
Visio mockups, drawings done in Paint, or scans or digital photos of sketches done
on napkins or scratch paper. Import these to EasyPrototype and they become the screens
of your application. A simple point-and-click interface lets you add tags to each
screen; by default, tags are displayed as numbered boxes, though you can assign
custom images to them. Each tag can have a description and a name, and you can set
a target page to display when you click on it.
When you're done tagging and describing pages, and using the target feature to link
them together, a couple of mouse clicks will convert the project into interactive
HTML, and optionally build a RTF document describing everything with screenshots.
This gives you something you can e-mail around or throw up on a screen to discuss
during a meeting, to make sure everyone understands the proposed workflow. Here's
an example that I threw together in under five minutes, including the time it took
to scan three sketches: zip of the HTML,
RTF document. That will give you an idea of the sort of output you can get
from EasyPrototype, though obviously you can get a bit fancier than I did.
EasyPrototype is available for either Windows or Mac, and you can download a 30-day
trial.