Sketchi: Prototyping Method and Toolkit.

While working on my current labor of love, I kept running into a problem. We’d make something and upon showing it to friends or peers or testers we’d get an entirely different reaction that we expected. Not that the reaction was negative - critical feedback is nutritious and delicious - just that their feedback was always focused on aspects that we were not yet tackling in the prototyping process. In fact, much of it (visual design for example) we were explicitly avoiding at this point in the process. This was less than fun when showing our work off to friends. When we were in usability testing sessions however, I feel it started to detract from the results.

It became obvious that it would be useful to communicate the level of fidelity that our prototype was functioning at beyond the usual initial disclaimer. One of the things that I love about paper prototyping is how clearly it represents the infancy of the ideas you are dealing with. Sure its quick, but its also a really effective way of communicating in a few other ways.

Borrowing this quality, I’ve thrown together a set of tools to help replicate this when working with early interface prototypes. At this point it is simply a set of images, css classes and font rendering with sIFR. The images use the CSS 3 border-image attribute. So at this point, you’ll need WebKit to make that work properly.

You can download Sketchi from its home on the Rilli site. I haven’t bothered with any sort of licensing or really even versioning since it is more a method than any sort of software or property.

We’ve got a few things that we’re cooking up there which we’ll be sharing in the coming months! I’m excited, see.