XCode Mobile Prototyping

by Kylie Tuosto

In 2013, Apple introduced a new feature in Xcode called Storyboarding. At first, I had no idea what this meant or why it was even important, but my development team started getting their hands dirty right away. Being fairly new mobile design, I hadn't already established a prototyping tool of choice, so I wondered if working directly in Xcode for clickable prototypes would even be possible.

Once I got over the hump of downloading the tool and learning my way around the interface, I got comfortable enough to build a click-through or two and run them in the iPhone simulator. It was like magic! Seeing my prototypes come to life inside a realistic looking device was going to be huge for testing with remote participants.

But as I worked with the tool over time, I found hidden benefits around every corner:

1. It gave my developers the opportunity to teach me what they work in every day.

2. I got to see where our code and assets were stored and how I could update them myself.

3. It changed the way I spec'd things like color values because I could see the input options that my dev team had to work with.

4. We were able to work closely to build hybrid (half-fake, half-real) prototypes to do proof of concept testing on important micro-interactions.

After using the tool myself and seeing how it brought our team closer together, I created this workshop to share what I learned across the company and to encourage other mobile designers to try out prototyping with Xcode.