---
title: "A Free Tool Called Fluidui Made Me a UI Designer"
date: 2012-12-10T14:23
author: Julien Reszka
description: "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."
keywords: ["design", "productivity", "engineering", "opportunity", "startups"]
canonical: https://julienreszka.com/blog/a-free-tool-called-fluidui-made-me-a-ui-designer/
---

# A Free Tool Called Fluidui Made Me a UI Designer

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.

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.

---

**Actionable insight:** 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.

## Key figure

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

*Source: Fluidui.com, 2012*

## Myth vs reality

**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.

*Source: Personal experience, 2012*