Experiences using three app prototyping tools with different levels of fidelity from a product design student’s perspective

Abstract

Prototyping has become a widely embraced technique in different design fields to facilitate early user involvement to ensure that the end-product meets the users’ needs. Each design field has its tools and traditions for working with prototypes. This paper documents experiences with smartphone app prototyping from a product design student’s perspective. Three prototyping tools with different fidelity levels were explored. Based on these experiences we reflect upon the prototyping tool characteristics and their suitability for non-computer scientist. We envisage that our experiences may be useful for other product designers who want to develop smartphone apps.