Early prototyping

It haven’t been a lot of coding for me lately. 

I’m currently working on extending an existing product with a new area of functionality. This involves a lot of studying and learning new stuff.

Some of the most exiting parts of this process is to notice how you gain more knowledge and understanding about the problem area as you go ahead and learn new stuff. I have been through this process several time before, but this time is a bit different as we are using some more time on the learning process. We are working in a broader area and there is no expert or customer that has full knowledge of the problem area.

The task at hand is to carve the product into shape, figure out what it should do and how it should do it. Kind of creating a product vision.

As a part of this I have done some very early prototyping. Earlier, when working with more concrete solutions, I have found that using Visual Studio in combination with bitmaps have worked relatively well. 

In this project that did not work at all. The outcome felt "to concrete", it did not leave enough room for the next phase and it quickly become too close to a real solution while at the same time being difficult to use.

Based on that experience and some more testing I’m currently using several tools to create GUI prototyping.
- I’m using paper/drawing to test out initial ideas and thoughts
- I’m using excel/word to test out special situations and presentation
- I’m using paint to steel small pictures/figures/symbols and ideas from other products
- I’m using power point to put together all elements, as well as adding simple animations to show transitions and illustrate the most important navigations

I’m sure that there is a lot of other GUI prototyping tools out there. However, to practically solve raising issue, I have found this method, using simple and available tools to work quite well as a way of sharing ideas and possible solutions with others.