Product Review: Mobile Prototyping and Testing with Justinmind

Remote Usability Testing

You can integrate tools like Keynote, UserZoom, Clicktale, Loop11, Userfly, Clixpy, Google Analytics, and Crazy Egg with Justinmind Prototyper.?Running usability tests using remote-testing tools lets you test your application prototypes in real-world settings that map to your users’ environments.

Creating Guidelines and Designing Patterns for Reuse

In addition to creating design concepts and testing them with a product’s target users, you can use Justinmind Prototyper to create branded guidelines and patterns for an organization. You can easily incorporate any corporate images into your prototypes, then either export them to HTML and publish them online or automatically generate an Open Office or Microsoft Word file containing all of your documentation. This makes it easy to maintain consistent documentation across projects and ensure key internal and external stakeholders are always on the same page.

This prototyping platform’s widget library includes patterns for the iOS and Android platforms. The library includes some sketchy widgets for concept creation, as well as higher fidelity widgets that you can use when creating prototypes for summative testing, as shown in Figure 3. Using Justinmind, it is easy to create prototypes employing design patterns that have been tested in the past. Just create your prototypes, test your designs, then reuse your tested patterns in your future projects. While your level of investment is higher in creating and testing patterns, there will be a reduced risk of usability issues’ cropping up when you reuse tested patterns.

Unique Value Proposition

Justinmind Prototyper’s unique value proposition is its ability to create highly interactive, low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes for mobile applications—as well as Web applications—simulate widgets’ behavior without coding, and save design patterns in a library for reuse. You can even simulate mobile gestures in your interactive prototypes. This ability to prototype gestures is especially important when you need to demonstrate mobile design concepts during a workshop or client meeting.

This prototyping platform can also simulate transactional data, allowing test participants to input data into form elements. For example, you could simulate an ecommerce checkout process for purchasing a product by creating a clickable prototype, then measure its efficiency during a usability testing session.

Justinmind Prototyper is more than just a tool for creating wireframes. This prototyping platform also helps you to integrate other processes such as requirements definition and usability testing, so you can validate your designs with users. Once you create an interactive mobile prototype, you can share it online and obtain feedback from stakeholders and users through a simulated or remote testing environment. The platform automatically generates your application’s code without your needing to have any programming knowledge and can also generate specifications documents.

Limitations

While Justinmind Prototyper provides considerable flexibility, first-timers will experience a learning curve in mastering the product’s user interface and prototyping environment. Experienced users may not find Prototyper the perfect end-to-end solution for creating concepts and testing applications, because of the following limitations:

• installation required—To use Prototyper, you must install the application and updates on your computer, which takes time and a lot of hard-disk space. This also complicates your working in the application on different computers, at different locations.
• uses jargon—It may take time for new users to understand and learn the jargon that Prototyper uses. For example, when using the product for the first time, terms like masters, containers, and data grids may be difficult to grasp.
• not easy to use—Prototyper’s usability has a long way to go before it would provide a great user experience. There are several points where one can get lost in the application. For example, creating a clickable prototype sounds easier to accomplish than it actually is using Prototyper. It takes a while to thoroughly understand the user journey the application presents.
• no support for custom widgets—Although Prototyper does let you drag and drop widgets to create low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes, it lacks a mature environment for prototyping design concepts when aesthetics come into play. Its stock high-fidelity widgets lack the custom look and feel that would be necessary to integrate them into high-fidelity prototypes of fully realized design concepts.
• limited usability testing environment—This prototyping platform lacks a complete usability testing environment. It does not incorporate the user guides and test protocols that would enable a facilitator to efficiently and effectively conduct usability tests. Thus, this tools’ limitations would likely make it necessary for a facilitator to use other tools for planning a study and recruiting participants and integrate third-party testing tools with Prototyper.
• overengineering—While Prototyper provides features that other prototyping tools on the market lack, it has become overly complex, and the application lacks seamless integration and consistency across its many features.

Conclusion

Justinmind Prototyper supports requirements gathering, wireframe creation, application simulation, and usability testing. You can use it to create interactive prototypes of both Web and mobile applications. As a bonus, Prototyper lets stakeholders and users provide feedback on your prototypes of mobile and Web applications. Thus, it incorporates all of the features that are necessary for a prototyping project.