What does Sketch’s update mean for other prototyping tools?

As you probably know, Sketch’s in-built prototyping is of the hotspots-with-noodles variety. It’s a great way to build a prototype that demonstrates the different screens of your app, but not a good way to prototype interactions. It’s more about overall flow than implementation details. And that’s great!

Given the wide range of prototyping needs and the wide range of prototyping tools, I don’t think there’s going to be a drastic change to the outlook of other tools.

I suspect Sketch’s prototyping will continue to evolve and improve, and that will mean it’s more and more useful in the future. But at the same time, there’s always going to be things you need to use a specialised tool for — something that’s based on code, timelines or one of the other methods for building prototypes.

Do you see yourself giving up the tool you were using? Or does this not affect your workflow at all?

I use and like a bunch of different things for different reasons. I can see the value in hotspots-with-noodles, but I personally don’t need to build many prototypes like that. Most of mine relate to single and more complex interactions, so I’ve used Principle, Flinto, and Framer in the past. Or, just made GIFs in Photoshop that show off the behaviour (surprisingly effective).

I like that prototyping is integrated into Sketch, but I also think it’s important to recognise that there is no one size fits all approach to prototyping. There’s a wide variety of solutions for a very specific reason — prototyping can be high or low fidelity, it can be used to learn or to demonstrate, it can be anything from the first pass of an idea, or to work out implementation details prior to writing code. There’s many jobs we hire prototyping for, and I don’t believe any single app can handle them all well, so having a few tools is good.

It’s definitely nice to have another good option though. From some initial use, Sketch’s prototyping works and does exactly what it says on the tin. :)