As the product manager for Indigo Studio, I get to keep an eye on what people are talking about in terms of interaction design and, especially, prototyping for interaction design, what I like to call interaction prototyping. You see, Indigo Studio is an interaction design tool. A key focus for it, then, is prototyping interactions, above and beyond static wireframing (although it can of course do static wireframing better…

Why?? Seriously. Interaction prototyping is so much more effective.

Honestly, it's a little baffling to me when I see the disconnect between theory and practice in UX/interaction design when it comes to wireframes and prototyping. For all our talk about "interaction design," we seem amazingly complacent when it comes to actually designing interactions.

"Oh, you need a design? Let me churn out a static wireframe…

If you're much like this fella, you probably get sick of all the garbage that most professional software tools foist on you. Bagillions of floating or docked panels, inspectors, property sheets, menus, etc. that you first have to wade through to learn and then remember; not to mention, they just get in your way.

When we were designing Indigo Studio, this was one of our key concerns. I can sympathize with the other…

There are many tools available today for designers that claim in some way to be a "prototyping" tool. Most of these imply some kind of interactive capability, and by far most of them, oddly enough, simply mean by this "you can create links between screens." You see this even in wireframing and otherwise static design tools--you can create a clickable PDF, you can link between pages, etc. Heck, even Visio lets you do this…