I’m sorry I never published Part 2 on Boxes and Arrows, but here’s a workshop workbook that I created that walks you through both parts, complete with visuals. It’s still based on ActionScript 2.0, but should be useful still for doing simple prototypes!

http://www.slideshare.net/ladylexy/flash-prototyping-workbook-part-1-and-2-3534139

BTW, you can also export flash straight from InDesign starting in CS4! Pretty fantastic.

What strikes me about these prototypes is their potential for generating a greater frequency of cross-cultural “a-ha!s” for both designers and users. Since the IXD’s role is to understand and then design for the different world of the users, the prototype is a good way to communicate the designers’ understanding (or identify a misunderstanding) of what the users need/expect. Particularly when the designers come from a demographic, nation, class, or language group which differs from the client. And profoundly when the user group may not yet fully understand the role or utility of the technology (e.g. when mobile tools were introduced to clinicians in hospital wards).

Conversely, designers have a chance to observe all the culturally-based subtleties of how the users interact with the technology. By observing the other-culture user experience, designers can identify trouble-spots that they never would have anticipated. Or they might find the test subjects use a feature in unanticipated but positive ways.

Yeah, I’ve just described the basic idea of usability testing, but I’m thinking here about the cultural dynamics. A deep understanding by both parties would not necessarily occur with lower fidelity prototypes because many cultural elements of the onscreen ecosystem (which impact interaction) are not present. The fact that a designer can make these robust prototypes quickly and change them efficiently means that cross-cultural epiphanies might occur more.

That said, I would advise caution when using this method, mainly clients – particularly where agencies tend to get carried away, in my experience, is with some of the additional presentation features which are possible in Flash. A cool pre-loader, swirly fade in-animation may be fantastic when it comes to impressing people when pitching a design, but really just sets everyone up to fail with unrealistic expections.

Be careful not to get carried away making something which is poor usability (but looks cool), or which is itself a pain to implement with vanilla HTML.

But I have not seen any resources online that talk about using it for prototyping.

Has anyone here tried it or considered it? What were your experiences/conclusions?

As I see it, the upside of using OpenLaszlo (or Flash, or XHTML+CSS+jQuery, or whatever) is that it allows you to simulate things that you just can’t do in a static, annotated wireframe. And also that you can play around with the interactions and make sure you have covered all the possible flows and ensure they make sense (e.g., what happens if the user cancels here? does it make sense to disable this control when the user makes a selection in a different control? etc.).

The downsides are that (a) it is not visual in the way that Photoshop or Visio are, and (b) it takes quite a lot of time and effort to create a prototype this way.

So the way I see it, if you choose to go down this route (whether it’s Flash, Laszlo, XHTML+whatever), you need to know when it’s necessary and when you can get away with something static. That is, the level of complexity determines whether you go with static or whether you go with dynamic.

Am I on the right track here?