Now that I’m making good progress with the design of the app, getting it in to the hands of other people to test it is trickier than I thought.
After a week of trying different ideas, and a couple of aborted attempts with Figma & Maze, I’ve settled on a specific prototyping tool.
Not quite ready to test
I was hoping that the interactive prototype feature of Figma was going to replace the need for another prototyping app.
I’d gone with a combination of Figma & Maze, using the awesome features of Maze to create & track the user tests. It was easy to synch the Figma prototype with Maze, and setup the user flows I wanted to test.
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As I started to share the initial prototype with friends, I realised a few key things:
- The experience of opening the prototype in the browser on a phone is very different from an actual app.
- I couldn’t work out how to fix the tab bar at the bottom of the screen, so once you got into the app, you couldn’t navigate between screens 🤦
- There were a few bugs in the interactive elements where transitions stuttered, and make it look glitchy.
- The desktop version of the user test worked really well - but it felt a bit daft testing a phone interface on a desktop browser.
I had a bit of a poke around, but couldn’t find a Figma or Maze utility app specifically for testing mobile apps. There’s a great Figma Mirroring app, but that relies on a direct wifi connection with the Figma artboards at the time of testing (not so great during lockdown).
The right tool for the job
A couple of years ago I worked with an arts charity helping them design & build a guidebook app for artists to learn how to archive their artwork.
One of the tools I used at the time was Marvel; it made it super easy to go from static mockups to something interactive that we could put in the hands of artists and get rapid feedback.
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On reflection, it makes sense to use a tool that was specifically designed to enable distributed testing, so I’ve put a bit of effort in this week to learning the best way to get the designs in to Marvel, and make them interactive.
I’m keeping a track of the things I’ve learned how to do in Marvel, and will share in the next post.