From hunch to code: Allele, a rapid-er prototyping framework
The market is awash with rapid prototyping tools.
They claim to empower us with the tools necessary to validate our ideas without ever investing in costly production development.
From Keynote to Axure, the idea is the same: to abstract complex technology to a level which allows us to focus on what matters: the interaction, content, experience, or whatever is the key to our new web-thing.
Which, in principle, makes a lot of sense when making-testing-and-learning, but I struggle to accept that, in 2013, we're still creating throw-away web mock-ups using desktop publishing tools.
While there is hope that the next evolution of design software will be an abstraction on top of web technology rather than a graphic design tool, forced to learn just enough of the language of the web in order to ask for directions, if we are to truly engage in rapid make-test-learn cycles (and maximise the 'learn' bit) we need a way to create experiential prototypes using the same medium in which the product will be delivered.
We need to be able to do this in as little time as we can mock something up in Keynote; in a way which is easy to adapt as we learn, without ever backing ourselves into a code-indebted corner.
So, as a start, we've put together a code framework - Allele . You can read more about it over at GitHub. It is, in short, an opinionated framework comprising of open-source projects with a focus on making stuff quickly while avoiding an off-the-shelf mentality, one which inevitably results in spending more time reverse-engineering than building testable functionality.
It's very much a work in progress, but in the spirit of learning-while-doing we've already used it to create working prototypes on a recent project in a matter of hours rather than weeks; it's allowing us to test with real content on real users who are engaging in real experiences.
Which is definitely preferable to spending the same amount of time spoofing interaction with a tool designed for presentation.