Towards a Requirements Catalogue for Prototyping Tools of Mobile User Interfaces

摘要

User-Interface prototypes are important for testing software design ideas in early stages, where changes can still be considered. This is especially true for mobile app interfaces that have to take into account a number of specific challenges. Accordingly, prototyping tools are needed that consider the specific conditions under which mobile apps are usually developed. Research on the topic provides a fragmented picture of categories to rate the usefulness of development tools; a comprehensive taxonomy is missing. In this paper we address this gap in identifying a set of 16 requirements, which were derived from literature research and evaluated with experts. The categories were then applied by experts to judge a newly introduced prototyping platform, which can be used to develop mixed-fidelity app prototypes on the basis of paper sketches. Although we do not claim that the developed set of requirements is complete, the described work can already help builders of mobile app development and prototyping tools. It provides a guideline that displays the importance of different requirement criteria, dependent on different development conditions.