From PDFs to HTML Prototypes

This seminar is part of our series in cooperation with

Nathan Curtis

Principal, EightShapes

Length: 90 minutes

I Want the RECORDING $149

Need to demonstrate rich ideas faster,
think through complex designs completely,
create appropriate artifacts for usability testing,
or meet client expectations

Wireframes. PDFs. Paper. There you have just a few examples of prototypes. They help your team create, communicate, or test a design idea. Those and others like them surely have a plethora of success stories. They also have their limitations.

The team at EightShapes are thought leaders in design documentation. This story is their journey to where the documentation — in this case, prototypes — has evolved to reflect richer interactions and more dynamic user experiences. Nathan Curtis, a founder and principal at EightShapes, is leading the charge of his team to use integrate HTML prototypes into their process, and in the seminar will show you how and why.

You’ll Learn:

How and when HTML prototypes can fit into your design process
How to honestly assess how your front-end coding skills and how you can progressively enrich your capabilities to make valuable contributions
How to recognize what you really need to prototype, balance it against other artifacts you’re creating, and identify when you’re spinning out of control
Why in most successful projects, it’s not about the skills or deliverable, but about the process and collaboration with your teammates and stakeholders

Evolving What We Produce

Design teams need to demonstrate richer interactions, earlier in the process, faster than ever before. They want ways to think through complex designs completely and to create artifacts suitable for usability testing. Most of all, they’re looking to ensure they meet client expectations.

More and more, HTML prototypes are getting them to where they need to be.

Using six real EightShapes projects as a backdrop, Nathan will show you how more dynamic documentation and design thinking has improved their process and communication. You’ll see how this technique covers documentation gaps that most prototypes miss. After this seminar, you’ll be able to thoughtfully consider how prototypes can fit into your own process and balance against – or outright replace – traditional deliverable outputs.

Learning the Skills

Talk to a designer, and you’re going to hear, “Yeah, I know HTML and CSS.” But the more informed answers carry more nuance: What’s your experience with front-end markup? How is your confidence in being able to implement this interaction or layout? How often do you do these things? And hey, you’re saying it’s about interactions, but didn’t even mention JavaScript...

Many designers are mystified – even downright scared – by cross-browser compatibility, JavaScript, JQuery selectors, progressive enhancement, and the subtleties of Responsive Web Design. But that doesn’t mean they can’t prototype in HTML to share design ideas. You’ll understand that while existing skills and experiences are really helpful, HTML prototyping still affords designers without deep coding experience the chance to contribute quickly and confidently.

Adapting to a New Process

We all respond differently to change, and you’ll have team members of different skill levels absorbing this new approach. Nathan will offer us tips for making HTML prototyping part of your process. You may even find it complimenting or replacing other deliverables. You’ll see how this technique will help you see the end of the project before you get there.

Ultimately, your design team has team dynamics, and incorporating such a radical new technique will be difficult for some, easy for others. The better an understanding you have of HTML prototyping, the earlier your team will experience success with it.

You’ll have the foundation you need to share and explore more complex design solutions.

Why Nathan Curtis, and this Special Series from EightShapes?

We love working with the team at EightShapes. They have been part of the UIE live conferences and delighted our audiences with their experience, resources, and great ideas. We were delighted—OK, thrilled—when they approached us about creating this series of special online seminars.

Nathan Curtis is a founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC. Nathan has been practicing varied disciplines within user experience design since 1996, and areas of interest include information architecture, interaction design, usability research, and front-end development. He started EightShapes in 2006 and has helped improve the user experience for clients around the world.

Nathan is the author of Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation, and the driving force behind EightShapes Unify. If you haven't explored what's available to you there, you should. What is it? EightShapes Unify is A documentation system to produce wireframes, maps, flows, storyboards, plans, style guides, specs, usability testing reports, and prototypes too!

Prior to founding EightShapes, Nathan led UX projects at Sprint Nextel, was a principal owner at BIG fish in Washington DC, and got his start at SAS Institute in R&D for statistical software applications. Nathan obtained a masters degree from the University of Chicago in 1996 following a B.S. in both Mathematics & Statistics from Virginia Tech in 1995.

I Want the RECORDING $149

These seminars are great, thanks! We sometimes have staff members who are unable to attend the live seminar, so we keep everything archived where anyone on the team can watch in the future.

Rachel S.