The other day I was putting together a review of community software platforms for a client, when I found something that sent a shockwave through my system: Atlassian‘s Confluence enterprise wiki has a plug-in for teams to do UI mock-ups with Balsamiq. http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/balsamiq.jsp or http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/confluence describes it.

An Historical Aside

I believe prototyping is the way of the future for web and software design. I bet my practice on it by setting a goal to shift my team (and company’s) practice from static page-based design to prototyping. I did this at www.jcp.com by bringing in iRise. I repeated this effort at Target by bringing in iRise there, too. However, each time the effort generated heat along with light. Pointing out that many other mature design domains – construction, engineering, automotive and aerospace vehicle design, and others – practice prototyping doesn’t quite win over those who have the pressure of due dates on them.

I find that design teams struggle with the shift to prototyping. Yes, we who see ourselves as _the_ innovative edge of the festering, bloated corporation that sustains us suffer the same fate as any other group vying for validity, promotion, funding, and attention – we resist change, even when it improves our situation. It seems, from my experience, that taking on a new practice might show the cracks of our previous/current practices. God forbid that anyone improve things, huh?

While at Target, I had the pleasure of being the project lead who launched the Target Pattern Library. Or, as they later re-branded it, the Target Interactive Framework. We chose Confluence to be the platform for our Pattern Library, and I recall one advantage was the extensive plug-in set available for the open source tool. Need a Flash player? There are plug-ins to choose from. Need to integrate it with the MS Office Suite? There are plug-ins for that, too.

The Anecdotal Fitness of Prototyping

In two different projects this past month, UI designers I work with justified their designs in a way that shows they view their assignment as crafting stand-alone pages, rather than building steps in interactive sequences. The most glaring memory I have of this is when pointing out that we should make the primary call-to-action a button, and then demote the secondary actions to links or less visually prominent button styles. Their retort was that having all calls-to-actions as buttons “gave the page balance”, as if it were a canvas upon which they had delivered aesthetic justice. Ahem.

Back at work, where we were building websites and web applications for people to use not just look at. This art-versus-design struggle illustrates a need for designing in an interactive, inherently fluid, perhaps transitory context, one that mimics that actual end state of the work.

Prototyping puts a selection pressure on design ideas. That pressure forces designers to design for the context(s) of use, rather than for an idealized context of artistry. This selection pressure forces the full project team to deal with the implications and consequences of their proposed scope of work.

Prototyping also gives a forum for the visual – if not tangible – realization of the ideas that solve the problems businesses encounter as they venture into the digital and hyperspace.

The Art and Practice of Simulation

There was a special power to iRise characterized by this experience: While at Target, I used iRise to build a prototype for their attribute-based (or faceted) navigation system. I had a meeting with the two project champions, and they were wrestling with some scenarios that seemed too complex to verbalize.

iRise has a scenario whiteboard. I used the scenario whiteboard to sketch out the scenarios they were struggling with. It took about 10 minutes of a brief Q+A for them to describe and me to sketch that scenario. Their comment, “Wow. In the past, when you guys [IAs] used Visio, it takes so long to do things that I wouldn’t have even bothered telling you.” Ouch. But, scratch the surface of that and find a difficult truth: The struggle between business and design prevents some ideas from reaching market.*

iRise calls it simulation. When you use iRise, you’re simulating the behavior of an application. iRise lets you use plug in real data and achieve high-level functionality and logic.

Balsamiq calls it mock-ups. Balsamiq is a web-based, thus shareable, tool for just roughing out a UI concept or scenario. This marries the familiar hand-crafting approach to sketching on paper with a web-based tool you can show to distant teammates or clients.

The Original Topic: Prototyping in a Corporate Context

Designing is group problem-solving. The larger the company, the more complex the problem-solving effort. After all, it’s not just solving the design problem(s) for the interface, but establishing buy-in on the project team, getting funding, seeing your proposals through to the end so that the final delivery matches what you’ve established.

The Balsamiq-Confluence mash-up created a shockwave in me because I’ve seen groups use Confluence and I can imagine, or visualize, people using Balsamiq to build mock-ups as part of their in-Confluence interactions.

Imagine the power of this combination. Confluence is a platform for bringing working groups together, documenting and sharing knowledge, enabling discussion in a wiki-style environment. This plug-in is a significant milestone: A prototyping tool embedded in a community platform.

*Sure, some business ideas shouldn’t reach the market. But, making it harder for all ideas to reach the market doesn’t improve the quality of any ideas.