How to Use Interactive Prototyping to Improve User Experience

Key takeaways

Interactive prototyping builds mockups that replicate a product’s flows, transitions, animations, and interactions. Here are some important facts to know:

• Interactive prototyping can help you turn designs into functional mockups, letting designers, developers, and stakeholders test the product before development.

• You’ll find a variety of online tools available to create interactive prototypes, including Adobe XD, Figma, or Justinmind.

• You can use prototypes to further your career as a UX designer. 

Learn more about how interactive prototypes can bring ideas to life. Afterward, you can start building your career in UX design by enrolling in the Google UX Design Professional Certificate. You’ll have the opportunity to apply foundational UX concepts, like user-centered design, accessibility, and equity-focused design, in as little as six months. By the end, you’ll have earned a career certificate and created a professional UX portfolio. 

What is interactive prototyping?

Interactive prototyping in product design involves building mockups that simulate the final product’s flows, transitions, animations, and interactions. You can use interactive prototyping to turn designs into reality, allowing designers, developers, and stakeholders to interact with the prototype and experience the user journey before full development. 

Types of interactive prototype tools

Many interactive prototyping tools are available for you to use, such as Figma or Justinmind. Learn about the different interactive prototyping tools and why you might consider using each to test your product:

Figma

Figma is a cloud-based design tool that enables real-time team collaboration, making it ideal for prototyping. It’s popular for its versatility and ease of use. Figma’s prototyping tools let you build interactive flows to test user interactions with your designs. Prototypes can show the full user journey or focus on a specific part through a single flow. 

Justinmind

Justinmind is a powerful tool for high-fidelity prototypes, ideal for complex web and mobile apps with detailed interactions and data-driven experiences. Justinmind provides you with web interactions, mobile gestures, sequences, and conditions to enhance interaction design. 

Adobe XD

Adobe XD is a UX/UI design tool in Creative Cloud. With features like auto-animate and voice prototyping, it’s ideal for interactive web and mobile prototypes. Adobe XD allows you to link screens into navigation flows with multiple artboards, then share them as links for feedback and publish across target platforms. You can even preview and record your prototype as an .mp4, then share it with stakeholders for review and feedback.

Proto.io

Proto.io is a robust tool for high-fidelity mobile prototypes, offering interactive components and animations to build realistic app simulations. Proto.io is a good prototyping solution for UX designers, entrepreneurs, product managers, and marketers. This tool requires no previous experience, providing you with over 250 UI components, over 1,000 templates, and more than 6,000 digital assets to work with. 

Axure

Axure is a professional prototyping tool for complex, data-driven projects, offering advanced features like conditional logic and dynamic content. You can use Axure to create UX prototypes with unlimited triggers, conditions, and actions to fully explore interactive digital experiences. It also provides powerful widgets to create functional forms, sortable grids, and interfaces. 

Which type of prototypes have user interactions?

As the name suggests, interactive prototypes have user interactions, including clickable buttons and navigable menus. Other forms of prototypes, like mockups or wireframes, are static prototypes with no user interaction, just visual representations. 

What are the key characteristics of an interactive prototype?

Key characteristics of interactive prototypes include clickable simulations, user flow focus, and easy iterations. Below, explore these characteristics further:

• Clickable simulations: Users can interact with buttons, menus, and elements, simulating the real experience.

• User flow focus: High-fidelity prototypes focus on smooth user flow, testing complex interactions, and revealing potential issues.

• Easy modifications: Interactive prototypes are easy to modify, helping designers at every stage of development and refinement.

Interactive prototype examples

You can use interactive prototyping to design entire websites, test user interactions, explore and iterate ideas, gather feedback from collaborators, and show off your design ideas to stakeholders. Some interactive prototype examples are as follows:

• E-commerce interactions: A prototype can cover all e-commerce interactions, including account creation, adding items to a cart, and checkout flows.

• Web design: Prototypes can reveal website UX issues early and give developers a clear guide, improving understanding and saving time.

• App design: Companies like Lyft use interactive prototyping to quickly communicate ideas and incorporate user feedback into products.

Who uses interactive prototyping? 

UX designers use interactive prototyping to benefit clients, product development teams, and users. Product designers, stakeholders, and users all benefit from interactive prototyping, since it lets them test and verify products prior to development. Some of the careers that utilize interactive prototyping as part of their roles include:

Product developers

Median annual US salary (Glassdoor): $94,000 [1]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2024 to 2034): 3 percent [2]

Top-paying companies: Cloudflare ($149,000 median annual US salary), Cisco ($145,000 median annual US salary), Razer ($144,000 median annual US salary) [1]

Product engineers

Median annual US salary (Glassdoor): $129,000 [3]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2024 to 2034): 11 percent [4]

Top-paying companies: Meta ($262,000 median annual US salary), , Dropbox ($241,000 median annual US salary), Google ($237,000 median annual US salary) [3]

UI/UX designers

Median annual US salary (Glassdoor): $109,000 [5]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2024 to 2034): 7 percent [6]

Top-paying companies: Google ($280,000 median annual US salary), Airbnb ($246,000 median annual US salary), LinkedIn ($236,000 median annual US salary) [5]

Read more: A Guide to Product Development Jobs: Roles, Skills, Salaries

Advantages of interactive prototypes

Interactive prototypes come with a variety of benefits, such as more efficient design communication, visualizing and testing before development starts, and saving time:

• Efficient design communication: Fully visualizing UX/UI details can make communication smoother and more efficient, especially when discussing navigation, both within and outside the design team.

• Time savings: Building an interactive prototype can delay the first product version, but it pays off by improving communication and saving time in later development.

• Better final resets: Testing early prototypes allows many design changes, improving the final result and reducing post-development fixes.

How designers can prototype tangible interactions with AR and VR​​

Virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) prototyping builds interactive experiences beyond screens, allowing users to engage with digital content more naturally and intuitively. Virtual reality prototyping enables faster, cheaper design and modification of parts or full product models for industries such as aerospace and aviation, automotive, health care, real estate, and consumer electronics. 

Discover free resources for UX designers

Discover our free online resources to help further your career in UX design, such as exploring your potential career path in UX Career Paths: Explore Roles & Specializations. You can also check out more free resources below:

• Watch on YouTube: Exploring In-Demand UX Designer Skills

• Explore a career path: What Does a UX Project Manager Do?

• Learn how AI is changing UX Design: AI in UX Design: Tools to Improve the Design Process

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