How do you prototype a large website?

Question

I am working on the rewrite of a large VB6-based application. We are moving from Windows Forms to web-based deployment using ASP .Net. There are about 50 core users and all are internal to the company.

We need an efficient way to try out different designs in order to investigate the information architecture of the site, the workflow, and the overall look and feel. Ideally, the prototype would look good enough to show to the users in order to gather feedback.

A few ajax-style drop-down menus or controls would be useful to demonstrate our ideas, but not at the expense of quick prototyping.

It feels too early to break out Visual Studio, and we need something more than pen and paper or Visio... Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Jeff Atwood had a nice article a while back about this:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001091.html

We used Visio the last project and while the Visio document screens look nearly identical to the end result I'd recommend against doing a pixel-perfect prototype. Simple rectangles and simple coloring are better and gives the designed and the web developers more freedom.

In our case some of the screens were developed by a person without good knowledge of limitations of web apps. Depending on the team members, this could lead to endless discussions about what is possible and what is not.

Answer 2

Have you taken a look at the excellent Balsamiq?

Answer 3

In the past we've used full page graphics - either pretty designs from our design team, or just Visio/PowerPoint (don't ask) mockups - dropped into HTML pages as a background and then added ImageMap links and dropped some dynamic controls on top - Drop-downs, pop-up/accordian menus etc to link most of them together.

This worked quite well in for A/B usability testing with our users - some were slightly confused by the pretty design versions, as they looked more like usable web pages, but they quickly got the hang of it.

Answer 4

I use JustProto.com - it's very simple but works very fast. I regret there are no ready components to use but you can create your own masters.

Anyway - I did a few prototypes with JP and for me it's fine enough.