Your Job is to Try 10,000 Things
Have you ever had an idea that seemed good, but you wouldn’t be sure until you were able to try it out? Designers face this conundrum frequently when deciding how a software feature should work. If you don’t face this challenge, you’re either a genius, or you mistakenly think you are. Unless you are all-knowing, you will come upon ideas that seem like they will work, but you can’t really tell until you know how it feels to use it. Since software development is expensive, you may hesitate to propose such ideas unless you are certain they will work out.
This is one of the reasons prototyping is valuable, you can try lots of things quickly and refine the ones that work. Prototyping interactions using Flinto for Mac will let you test lots of interaction ideas before a software engineer ever sees them. Prototypes answer questions like, “Will this look weird if it animates?”, “Will it feel more natural for this to be a swipe gesture”, “Is there any reason not to shrink this photo?”. Testing those questions on your own through prototyping will give you confidence of their efficacy when proposing ideas to your team. And you’ll have a demo to back it up.
Industrial designers have a bigger barrier to creating products than those of us designing software. It’s not possible to build hardware, notice something wrong and then tweak it. Industrial designers build countless models to get a feel for their design before having the final product built.
Software designers are gaining the ability to do the same thing thanks to prototyping tools like Flinto for Mac. Our hope is that you’ll use Flinto for Mac to try 10,000 things, and maybe a few of them will be brilliant ideas you wouldn’t have proposed otherwise.