From Sketches to Functional Prototypes - Extending WireframeSketcher with Prototype Generation

Abstract

When designing graphical user interfaces (GUI) for software applications an important part of the process is prototyping. Initially layout and in- teraction is often more interesting than the actual look of the design itself. There are several tools available that allow users to create sim- plistic low fidelity sketches which are fast and easy to work with. The problem arrives when developers need to implement the design in order to create functional prototypes - prototypes that also include some of the functionality of the planned application. The underlying sketch-design data is normally not compatible with the tools used by the developers, so it gets discarded and the same design has to be recreated by the developers which affects costs and efficiency. This process works poorly. In this thesis the prototyping tool WireframeSketcher has been extended with information that makes it possible to generate a functional proto- type to a certain degree from a sketch. The solution is implemented using Eclipse and consists of two programs. One program handles the parsing of sketches and generation of data required for the functional pro- totype, while the other program is responsible for running the functional prototype itself. The solution utilizes simple graphical notes within Wire- frameSketcher in order to augment the sketch with information regarding functionality. This information is interpreted by the programs and the result is a functional prototype. After development a set of qualitative user-tests were conducted and they indicate that the result is a viable solution for turning sketches into functional prototypes.