What You Can Do with Indigo Studio
About Indigo Studio
If You Can Imagine It, You Can Prototype It
Well, okay, that's a bit of an overstatement, but we hope it's not too far off the mark, at least for software application user interfaces (UI). Indigo is all about rapid, code-free prototyping. We've designed it from the ground up with good interaction design in mind.
Interactions are central to what the tool is. Interaction design (IxD) prototyping is the lifeblood of Indigo. Most of the tools interaction designers use are appropriations of other tools (visual/graphical design tools, animation/motion design tools, diagramming tools, presentation tools, spreadsheets & word processing tools, even software architecture modeling tools). Very few tools are designed specifically with good UI design in mind, and most of those tools are for static wireframes or, at best, clickable mockups.
With Indigo, you can of course design static UIs. You can of course create clickable mockups. But if all we did was another "me too," what would be the point?
There are a few tools that support interaction design prototyping. We won't name them. ;) But when we were looking for a good IxD prototyping tool, we found that they either tacked on prototyping as an afterthought, or they required a lot of technical knowledge - even coding. For some folks, that's fine, but we wanted a tool that would let us explore and express our design concepts quickly, without needing a lot of technical knowledge or coding. We couldn't find one, so we made Indigo.
And that's precisely the heart of what you can do with Indigo: explore and express software UI design concepts quickly, with little technical knowledge needed, at the right level of fidelity that you need.
Helping You Craft Better UIs
In addition to supporting the essential activity of prototyping UIs, we wanted to more fully support a good interaction design process, with a solid focus on people and the contexts they use these tools in. That's why we included a storyboarding tool, so you don't just start with users in mind; you can keep them tied into the exploration and evolution of your designs as you progress through iterations and increasing levels of fidelity.
We're purposefully choosing controls and options to make leveraging good UX patterns easier, and we will continue to do this and expand on the control library and other design helps in the tool. We know that a lot of software needs to be designed without the help of a dedicated UX/IxD person, and we're trying to help folks in that situation, as well as facilitate design for those professionals.
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