Design your way

Artists are only as good as their skill with a brush.

Mankind’s imagination has always been limited by technical skill: artists by their hands, architects by math, and most recently designers by coding.

Time and time again, designers are told their idea simply can’t be done just because it’s impossible to code. How liberating would it be if design used prototyping software that didn’t rely on coding?

Well, the time has finally come. Over the last few years, prototyping software that doesn’t use coding has been getting more and more popular, like Mockplus, among others.

Prototyping tools like Mockplus removes coding skill from the equation, allowing designers to focus exclusively on directly related skills like UX and interaction design.

User experience, interaction design, interface design, etc., all have the same goal: satisfying the user.

As a standard blueprint, coding is indifferent from the needs of the user, so it falls solely on the designer to consider the human component. That makes coding a distraction from the main goal, and gives the advantage to prototyping software without code.

But how does it work? How can codeless prototyping software create interactive designs that seamlessly translate into functional software?

Can a new designer use codeless prototyping software to break into the industry? We’ll answer all these questions below, starting with the most important one…

How Does WYSIWYG Prototyping Software Work?

To answer this question as succinctly as possible: pre-programmed components. Codeless prototyping software like Mockplus takes care of all the coding issues before you even start designing. Then, when you’re finished, you can export the project into your preferred format: HTML, .exe, .app, and many more.

This boils design down to only its essentials so designers have less things to worry about. Less time is wasted on figuring out whether it “can be done” and more time is spent determining the best possible designs for user experience, interaction design, and all other parts of a successful digital product.

There’s also the immediacy of designing with the what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface. No guesswork or potential fallout; the way you design it in the prototyping software is the way the final product will look and behave.

Mockplus’s interface is as easy as dragging and dropping. Simply go to the category of the design element you want (i.e., Popup Panel, Image Carousel, etc.) and drag it into place. Not only does this make the actual designing process more streamlined and organic, it also speeds it up considerably.

Of course, how good codeless prototyping software really is depends on the breadth of their pre-designed library.

As a frame of reference, Mockplus has 200 components and over 3,000 icons. This variety gives the designer more potential to be creative, and also safeguards against two different prototypes looking the same.

Easier Usability Testing

As we said above, a design’s success depends on how well it serves the user’s needs. Hitting this mark is one of the hardest parts of design; your end users are often unpredictable, and have a wide variety of individual preferences.

The only way to truly know for sure how your product will be received is through usability testing. Again, codeless prototyping software has the advantage.

Prototyping software like ours streamlines the entire testing process. You can build, test, integrate feedback, and rebuild in less time, with less hassle.

In part, this is thanks to the easy drag-and-drop interface mentioned above. Designers can swap or delete elements in a matter of seconds, compared to the exhaustive task of rewriting code.

Additionally, Mockplus has built-in features specifically for making usability testing easier. They have multiple features for getting your prototypes into the hands of testers and colleagues:

Scannable QR Code: Users only need to scan a QR code to instantly upload the prototype on their natural device — no USB cord required.
Shareable Web Links: Put your prototype in the cloud and share it through web links with whomever you want, no matter the location.
Offline HTML: If the other options are closed to you, you can always export your prototype to offline HTML and share it that way.

These, plus the quick turnaround time for reiterating and retesting, make prototyping software without coding the optimal choice for usability testing.

If You’re a Designer, You’re an Artist

Design has more do with artistic skill than coding skill. Creativity, empathy, emotional awareness, and understanding how the human mind works are more useful traits to a designer than an encyclopedic knowledge of tags and rules.

Codeless prototyping software lets designers focus more on these skills without sacrificing anything from the necessary technical details. The design process becomes closer to an artistic process, where designers are free to create with minimum interruption.

Moreover, prototyping software lets you import files from other image apps, so you can create designs in whatever software you’re most comfortable with. In the recent v3.2 update, designers can import static images from Sketch and turn them into interactive elements in Mockplus.

Prototyping software without code also favors beginners and those just breaking into the design world. Unless you’re transitioning from programming, new designers will probably have little working knowledge of coding.

But also, a simpler interface reduces the learning curve greatly, so both veteran and beginner designers can use prototyping software like Mockplus right out of the box.

Don’t Ignore Coding Completely

We don’t want to give the impression that coding and design are completely separate.

The fact remains that coding is the language of design, and so the two will always be intrinsically linked. This means it’s still beneficial for designers to have some understanding of code, even if just the basics.

In an earlier article about whether designers should know about code, the conclusion we came to was that designer don’t need to learn code, but understanding the basics will help.

Creating digital products is a team effort. We agree that specialists like UX designers and developers should each be masters of their respective fields, but it helps when each understands what the other does. Designers shouldn’t spend time learning how to code, but if they know how coding works in general it makes collaboration easier.

Furthermore, some companies don’t have the luxury of differentiating. For startups and SMBs, the employees must wear a lot of hats; disciplines like UX design, interaction design, web mastering, and programming all overlap and are assigned to whomever’s available, regardless of skill.

This makes codeless prototyping software even more valuable, since it reduces the company’s dependence on programmers until its budget can sustain them.

Takeaway

Technology always moves forward, never backward.

Today’s codeless prototyping software gives an advantage that even designers just a few years ago were missing: the ability to create designs without having to worry about code. This brings with it any number of powerful benefits:

streamlines the entire design process
quickens the turnaround time between integrating feedback and re-releasing the next iteration
facilitates user testing
emphasizes the more specialized fields of design like UX and interaction design
opens up the field to more potential designers

That’s not to say that designers should neglect coding, it just means they don’t have to depend on it as much. By removing unnecessary obstacles, prototyping software without coding allows designers to concentrate only on what they do best: design.

How much does codeless prototyping software really help? See for yourself with the Mockplus free trial.

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