Building a Minimum Viable Product? Find out why Protopie is PERFECT

As a Designer, Developer or User Experience enthusiast, you quickly realize after some time in the space that when you take on certain Minimum Viable product design briefs, mockups and wireframes do not adequately do the job of: Laying out the vision you want the Product to achieve from a user experience angle. Yes, your design […]

As a Designer, Developer or User Experience enthusiast,  you quickly realize after some time in the space that when you take on certain Minimum Viable product design briefs, mockups and wireframes do not adequately do  the job of:

  • Laying out the vision you want the Product to achieve from a user experience angle. Yes, your design looks good as a two-dimensional interface but how will the core users of the application interact with it?
  • Translating these requirements and constraints into actionable and meaningful “proof of product” aka Minimum Viable Product that your clients and stakeholders can play around with, before deciding they want to invest fully in building the product.

You want to be reasonably sure you can bridge the gap of understanding with your stakeholders to make sure everybody involved in the product development is on the same page as to what value is being delivered. This is where prototyping your products come in, highly interactive prototypes help you share your ideas clearly with your stakeholders to agree on what the end goals should be.


What prototypes do, is help make sure there’s no disparity between your expectation and reality for your product, this especially helps in projects where the endgame is to build a minimum viable product, you want to make sure that you’re making the right design decisions before going headfirst into development. This brings us to why we chose Protopie.

But First – An introduction

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Asides the fact that we love the name Protopie, ProtoPie is a powerful high Fidelity prototyping tool that empowers designers to build the most advanced, highly interactive prototypes easily and quickly deployable and shareable on any device while utilizing smart device sensors.

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The logic that drives  ProtoPie is that high-fidelity prototyping should be done easily and quickly; as seen in this quote by Tony Kim, founder of ProtoPie: “I believe in hi-fi prototyping. The prototypes that any designer should make are the ones that resemble the real deal, in regards to the way the user interacts.” 

As high fidelity interactions are key in the design process for modeling user interactions, the golden formula of ProtoPie surrounding interactions is simple:

Protopie Concept Model.

According to the Protopie website “ProtoPie’s concept model is based on how objects move in the world instead of programming. ProtoPie allows users to generate Interactions with Objects, Triggers, and Responses. Objects are the assets that will be moved or otherwise affected, Triggers are those that will move or change the Objects, and Responses are the changes that the Triggers create”

We found that this model serves as the core foundation of ProtoPie’s user interface making it easy to build high-fidelity prototypes while making the learning curve truly interesting and simple and in all this, our designers do not need to learn how to code and developers can focus on actually building the product. As you can imagine, this does wonders for project management and teamwork.

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The process flow is simple, we begin the design in Adobe XD, which allows for some micro-interactions, but is limited to just basics and subsequently export to Protopie to do something a little more advanced and realistic.  One of the most useful tools in Protopie is the Trigger.

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Trigger is one of the most powerful tools on Protopie because it allows for incredible animation of digital elements/components, whilst keeping them responsive to touch, sound and motion. The basic motif here is – interactivity.

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An object changes in state or provides some sort of feedback only if there’s a force acting on it (internally or externally) and this feeds back to “Object  + Trigger + Feedback/Response” principle.

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Objects can either be created within Protopie using the basic shape tools or by importing them into Protopie from other design tools. These are some of the  interesting triggers we have worked with so far:

  • Touch triggers
  • Mouse triggers
  • Keyboard triggers
  • Conditional. triggers
  • Input triggers
  • Sensor triggers

Below are some cool things that could be done with Protopie:

  • Drag and Release (gesture)
  • Toggles with conditions
  • Screen transitions
  • Pull to dismiss
  • Input and Submit (for forms)
  • Chain and 3D Drag (more like CSS 3D perspective property)
  • Detect using formula (can help with matching key points on a graph to values gotten from a formula)
  • Range and card animation (range is more like a conditional trigger, it carries out actions within an area based on if-statements)
  • Variables and detect mouse.

 

Our team works in an agile and fast-paced environment, so it is very important for us to be able to adapt to changes on the go and deliver prototypes quickly and efficiently. Viewed from this perspective, using Protopie has made it exceptionally easy to iterate and rapidly transform our prototypes in a way that matches client demands. This has proven priceless for our processes and workflow.

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Simultaneously, Protopie lets us develop detailed prototypes that lend themselves to fully-fledged usability testing, showing real and useful interactions that center users. It goes without saying that we highly recommend Protopie to any design and development teams looking to scale their processes without sacrificing professionalism and the ability to build some really cool stuff.

To see some of the interesting things we have done with Protopie at Astract9, you should also check out the following links:

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Are you in the beginning stages of building your Minimum Viable Product? Or looking to build a software solution? let’s talk.

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Or just give us a call at 0701 650 4685.

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