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Credits: Jason Kunesh

Download the Data Logger (Excel & Manual).

In Stephen’s own words:

The Mental Notes cards were designed to be idea starters and can be used at almost any stage of product development. They’re great for generating new product or feature ideas or finding creative solutions to problems.

While there is no one right way to use these cards (it’s fun to simply learn or review these ideas!), I’ve found the following phrase quite helpful during brainstorming sessions: “How can we use [card] to … [goal]?”

Credits: Stephen P. Anderson

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How useful is this for interaction designers? I think stop-frame animation has a great deal of potential for demonstrating and communicating highly interactive elements. Although I doubt it makes any sense in doing the full scope of a project in this format, using stop motion for parts of a prototype could be the way to go.

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Credits: Seok-Hyung Bae, Ravin Balakrishnan, and Karan Singh

A cool idea, but there is a small catch. If I understand correctly, the whole thing is still waiting to get approved to the App Store and there is some uncertainty if it will or not get accepted. Either way, the code is also open sourced and should be available on git hub, so at least it should be available for internal development purposes. In Rob’s own words:

The Briefs toolkit was created for rapidly building & iterating design concepts. It allows one to quickly prototype those concepts and run them on iPhone OS devices. These prototypes run directly on the phone, like actual apps, but require much less time and code to produce than a prototype built using only the native APIs. Less code means faster design cycles followed by more a efficient development cycle.

Find out more at giveabrief.com.

Give it a shot and try it out.

I still haven’t tried out this tool on a real UI design project, but the concept is definitely inspirational and so I thought to share it. The K-Sketch project opens up the possibility and idea of sketching in the context of a timeline, which I think is quite novel in itself. If the desire of designers to express interactions seamlessly with the use of animation is strong enough (which I think it is), my guess is that we’ll be seeing more and more of functionality such as this in our prototyping tools of the future.

Download it and try it out yourself.

Here is another explanation straight off from their website:

K-Sketch allows ordinary computer users to create informal animations from sketches. Current tools for creating animation are extremely complex. This makes it difficult for designers to prototype animations and nearly impossible for novices to create them at all. Simple animation systems exist but severely restrict the types of motion that can be represented. To guide the design K-Sketch, we have conducted field studies into the needs of professional and novice animators. These studies showed the wide variety of motions that users desire in informal animations and indicate how to prioritize these types of motion. Our design allows the most important types of motion to be defined with pen gestures, and gives visual feedback for coordination of events.

Credits: Prof. Richard Davis

SketchFlow I’d say is a bit more of an advanced prototyping tool. It comes with a lot of menus, options and tool bars. At the same time this opens up more flexibility for creating more interactive prototypes supported by various rules. One of the really interesting thing in this software is the juxtaposition of the canvas along side a site map view. In the SketchFlow Map view, users basically can manage their pages and components, create a flow between them, and rearrange them in a two dimensional space in whichever way they see fit. This provides a quicker way to access the items being worked on and at the same time gives a good overview of the flow in between screens.

To see for yourself, jump right in and try out the demo.