A Free Tool Called Fluidui Made Me a UI Designer

Julien Reszka · 2012-12-10T14:23

Fluidui let me click through my own mockups the same way a real user would. That feedback loop was faster than anything I had tried before.

2012 — Year browser-based interactive prototyping tools became accessible to non-engineers, letting anyone design clickable UI mockups without writing code — **2012** Year browser-based interactive prototyping tools became accessible to non-engineers, letting anyone design clickable UI mockups without writing code Fluidui.com, 2012

I found Fluidui this month and I have spent the last week making mockups of things I want to build.

The thing that changed my approach was interactivity. Every mockup tool I had used before produced a static image. You could look at it but not touch it. Fluidui lets you link screens together so that pressing a button actually navigates to the next screen. You click through the design the same way a real user would.

That gap between looking at a design and clicking through it turns out to be enormous. The moment I made my first tap target too small and had to reach for it with my thumb on a phone preview, I understood responsive design differently than I had from reading about it.

What I learned from the first week:

Static mockups lie. You think you understand the layout until you try to tap the button you drew.
Showing someone a clickable prototype gets a real reaction. Showing a screenshot gets a polite one.
The fastest way to know if an idea works is to make it clickable and hand it to someone.
You find the broken transitions first. Navigation problems are invisible on paper.
Free tools have feature limits that force good decisions. Constraints on screen count made me cut.

I do not know yet if I want to become a UI designer professionally. But I know that building mockups and clicking through them has taught me more about how interfaces work than anything else I have tried. The tool is free. The feedback is immediate. There is no reason to wait.

Myth: You need to learn to code before you can design real user interfaces — Reality: Interactive prototyping tools like Fluidui let you build clickable mockups in the browser with no code. Clicking through your own design teaches you more about UX than reading about it. — **Myth:** You need to learn to code before you can design real user interfacesPersonal experience, 2012

Pick one screen from a product you use every day and rebuild it as a clickable prototype in a free tool. The gap between what you intended and what you built is the lesson.
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Discussion

Have you ever clicked through your own mockup and immediately spotted a problem you missed while drawing it?
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