In Part 2 of the Prototyping and UX Design series, Dave Broschinsky of LANDESK Software explores how prototyping helps even non-designers contribute to better product development

By Dave Broschinsky, UX Principal at LANDESK Software

Note: Dave Broschinsky talks more about UX prototyping in our new podcast: The Storyboard: Conversations About UX (Download | iTunes | RSS | Google Play | Stitcher | Soundcloud). It’s a substantive…

In Part 1 of the Prototyping and UX Design series, Dave Broschinsky of LANDESK Software explores why prototyping is a crucial part of the software design and development process.

By Dave Broschinsky, UX Principal at LANDESK Software

Note: Dave Broschinsky talks more about the important role empathy and trust play in UX prototyping in our new podcast: The Storyboard: Conversations About UX (iTunes | Stitcher | Google Play…

We’ve just released a new version of Indigo Studio - the code-free design tool that brings designers, developers, product managers and users together for fast, easy, and—most importantly--collaborative prototyping and usability testing.

This new release raises the bar on collaboration through new group workspaces, while lowering the cost of it through convenient free and subscription plans and hands-on training…

With group workspaces, you can create a private design community, where other invited members can also publish designs. It’s a shared space on indigodesigned.com where you can freely and privately collaborate on prototypes, design libraries or usability studies. And if someone leaves the workspace or team, the remaining members will still have access to the designs and project files.

You can still publish designs…

We often mistake fidelity as an attribute of the prototype. Referring to prototypes as a low or high-fidelity version inadvertently biases us to consider or expect the level of detail present; in practice, it does not matter. Why? It’s more productive if the level of detail happens as a coincidence as opposed to an upfront goal of prototyping. Our goal should be to deliver the highest fidelity of experience using the…

One main purpose for conducting a usability study is to find out how well your design meets users’ expectations, and get some targeted usage data to help evaluate this in practice. However, collecting a lot of data about usage is useless unless it’s actionable. That is, it should quickly let you identify tasks that are problematic, and even better if it let's you identify the problematic step in the task flow.…

When Indigo Studio’s product vision was first drafted, it was always intended to be a prototyping solution and not just prototyping tool. Our ultimate goal is to support the prototyping process for software based applications.

Rapid Prototyping Process = Design + Evaluation

We made Indigo Studio to rapidly design UI prototypes. Equally important to us is the ability to conduct usability studies with target users…

It’s full of much requested features, and we know that you are going to love it! :)

FYI, we are changing how we name major releases for Indigo Studio. Instead of calling it version 6.0, it’s now Indigo Studio 2015 Vol.2. The first number is for the year of release (e.g., 2015) and the volume number indicates whether it’s the first or second major release for that year (e.g., Vol. 2). In addition to the two major…

Version 5 (update 1) includes the following:

• Download and import UI libraries from indigodesigned.com
• New “replace existing share” flow
• Sign in to indigodesigned.com from the desktop application

Download and Import UI Libraries from Indigodesigned.com

You can explore, download and import UI libraries shared by community users without leaving the Indigo Studio application. UI libraries or screenparts are…

One of our design goals is to provide a distraction-free design time experience. As part of this, we try to reveal functionality depending on where you are in the design flow and in context.

In this update we revisited the properties panel and UI guides. 

Docking the Properties Panel

For rapid prototyping showing the properties panel near the selected element made it easy to understand what to do next. This is especially…

Today we are announcing the ability to add comments to prototypes! Since everyone is pretty familiar with adding comments, we don’t need to go too much in detail :D.

• Sharing on Indigodesigned.com to add comments
• Manage comments
• Email notifications, realtime comments, and more
• What happens at the end of BETA?
• About indigodesigned.com

Share Prototypes on Indigodesigned.com to Add Comments

Commenting is part of…

Long text documents and prototypes often suffer from a common problem — the more you add to it, the more unwieldy it becomes. For documents, you can break it up into smaller pieces or separate documents, which you can then easily combine when it’s time to print or share. This way, when you are making changes to one document, you don’t need to worry about the rest. If you have written long documents using MS-Word, you…

Whether you are migrating your application from desktop to web or creating a native mobile app for an existing desktop application, there is going to be change.  One obvious change is that the technology stack used for the newer implementation. But there are other changes that are not readily apparent:

• Your business has evolved: From the time the application was first built, the business/service has evolved, and newer…

Today we launched v5 of Indigo Studio! At first glance, it may seem that not a lot changed. In fact, it’s quite the opposite! Let me walk you through some key highlights:

• Announcing indigodesigned.com
• Anonymous, Private & Community Shares
• Claiming Anonymous Shares
• Sharing (and importing) custom UI libraries

Introducing indigodesigned.com

Before v5, when you shared a prototype on Infragistics server, you…

Here’s what you will find in Version 4 (update 3):

• Drag reorder open tabs (documents)
• Editors for position and size
• Project refresh
• Search and delete screenparts
• Enhancements to image picker
• Hiding Property Editor during multi-select
• Tweaks to UI elements toolbox
• Bug fixes

Drag Reorder Open Tabs

In a previous update, we overhauled the project tab for open projects and documents. And now we are taking it one step…

We added the following new features in Version 4 (update 2):

• Enhanced Map stencil to display Google Maps
• Enhanced Video stencil to display videos (e.g., Youtube)
• Redesigned Project tabs as a compact dropdown
• Options to view all open projects and documents
• New iPhone 6/6+ devices Chromes and related tweaks to iOS Pack
• Right-aligning text inside text input box
• Touch cursor for touch-based prototypes
• Bug fixes

Enhanced…

We added the following new features in Version 4 (update 1):

• Support for background image inside cells of Bootstrap containers
• Generating HTML code assets from responsive prototypes (BETA)
• Create new designs from the project tab
• List view option in the project home
• Start a new Project" option in the application menu
• Bug fixes

Background Images Support for Bootstrap Cells

In version 4, we introduced…

It has been a productive release season, and I hope you agree too! Since the release of version 3 in April-2014, we have continued to release product updates with new features!

To see what we released till date check out our product release notes. If you haven’t updated your version of Indigo Studio, you should!

With the launch of Version 4, Indigo Studio is laying the foundation for responsive web-pages. And we…

We are pretty busy working on the next major version of Indigo Studio, but that does not mean that we don’t release our regular update :).

Update 4 includes:

• Creating and editing visual guides
• Rulers for the canvas
• Option to disable UI elements
• More icons
• Bug fixes

Creating and Editing Visual Guides using Rulers

Indigo Studio already had snapping guides and equal spacing hints ever since we shipped v1. For…

What's included in this update, you wonder? Here's the gleaming list:

• Replace existing shared prototype
• Delete shared prototype
• View screen states inside project home
• Easily add navigate-to interaction to screen state
• Nest screenpart inside another screenpart
• Faster maintenance updates
• Auto-size images for iOS device prototypes
• Nest groups inside another group
• Cut & Paste improvements

Replace…

This article is part 2 of two-part series. The purpose of this series is to compare and contrast Axure vs. Indigo Studio. In the process, help new users understand the prototyping approach in Indigo Studio, especially if they have used Axure in the past. This article is not a feature-by-feature comparison; it compares the prototyping approaches of the two tools by actually trying to build a prototype. After all, how else…

Many of our users who build UI prototypes often ask us how different is Indigo Studio from Axure. Perhaps our users have prior experience with Axure or similar products, and simply wish to understand how much of their learned experience can be transferred to Indigo Studio.

Unlike many of the tools that approach prototyping as linking screens, Indigo Studio and Axure adopt the state model in addition to screens. And while…

In this update, we added several visual improvements to the look and feel of Indigo Studio in addition to adding some requested features. These include the following:

• Tweaks to project home
• Clipboard paste for images
• Color picker improvements - recent colors and eye-dropper
• Improvements to setting fonts
• Changed ordering of elements in Elements & Layers (most recent on top)

Project Home UI Tweaks

We finally…

In version 3, we added the capability to create custom UI libraries using screenparts. If you haven't tried this yet, you are missing out :D.This was one of the top requested ideas. And with that, it's time to move on to even bigger and better things. Keep the ideas rolling in!

To kick off the "update" season for Version 3, we added the following new features in update 1:

• Image thumbnails in the prototype…

Screenpart was always a critical piece of our prototyping vision for Indigo Studio. Ever since we decided to build Indigo Studio, screenpart was always there, sharing the stage with storyboards and screens. The following graphic tries to summarize the inter-relationship:

We love the UX process, and it exists for a reason. As designers, what we discover first is the story-of-use and stories that are desired. I tend to…