Blog | Crank Software

Prototyping Embedded UI's: How to go from Flash to product?

Written by Thomas Fletcher | Jun 2, 2010 1:22:39 PM

I was trolling around some user interface design sites and came across this catchy abstract title:

Prototyping an Embedded UI with Scripted Use Cases

It is part of the Flash Design conference put together by FITC.

I find the abstract intriguing because the abstract speaks directly to one of the problems that we regularly encounter with customers who are using Flash as an embedded UI prototyping tool: How to get from prototype to product.  It is easy to imagine how a near complete user interface could be quickly and fully constructed in Flash to get through to the approval state for product development and then completely stall because of the mis-match in expressive capabilities between Flash and whatever embedded graphical technology is selected.

This dilemma has always been one of the motivating factors for our development of Storyboard:  Develop a prototype that is deployable.  Empower graphic designers to build creative, expressive user interfaces with rich graphical content that can be effectively realized as a product on today's cost effective hardware platforms.

It is a tall order to fill ... but the recent Storyboard 1.1 release is proof that it is possible .. now all I need is a ticket to San Francisco to see what Josh has to say about how they worked through their deployment issues.

Thomas