It’s also sometimes an advantage that these tools limit the amount of “design” and realism you can achieve: a dumber, obviously throw-away prototype allows the discussion to focus on process flows and functionality, not colours and contours. When you think your prototype is going to be used for the actual build, there’s a temptation to perfect details that are not important for the prototype build, making that phase take longer or focus on the wrong things.

It depends a lot on the team and the project, though. HTML prototyping is certainly a valid approach in a lot of cases.

Martin

In the most successful projects I’ve been involved in, we don’t have visual designers. We have user experience designers. They will certainly start in Photoshop to get visual direction from the client. But our designers are all user interface people first and visual designers second. The visual design is driven by a careful analysis of what users actually do with the system, starting from personas and use cases.

The designers also understand how the web works (e.g. the limitations of HTML, cross-browser concerns etc), and how CMS’s work (e.g. the need for content-managed elements to be markup, not images, and the implications for what you can achieve in the design).

The next step from Photoshop is normally UI prototyping, using a tool such as Axure. This is then tested on real users. The idea is to see how the design helps users achieve realistic tasks. For a low-budget alternative, I’ve also used Mockingbird (http://gomockingbird.com)

Once this is complete, the PSD + prototype are turned into an HTML template. I find that having a “plain HTML” template is invaluable. Building anything straight in the CMS tends to cause the design to fall apart in a way that is difficult to counteract. A canonical, cross-browser-tested HTML template gives everyone a common starting point. In many cases, it has also proved useful in other integration work. (In Plone now, we also use tools like XDV or Deliverance which means that applying a plain-HTML template to the CMS is quite easy.)

Of course, the designs and prototypes also become the starting point for more technical implementation work, which is normally specified and prototyped in parallel.

Martin