This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
The Prototype Middle Path
I saw a great article on Balancing fidelity in prototyping. It is easy to over do prototypes, leading to lots of wasted effort. I've been guilty of under-developing prototypes as well, because the ideas seem so clear in my head.
Here's how I think I'm doing on the Stellar Images prototype.
Don't get carried away in making the prototype look pretty
I haven't done any more that the minimal styling, since I assume the style of the tool will come from the course management system it's working with. Many developers would do less, many designers would do more, but I've aimed for the middle path.
Keep interactivity at a medium to high level
I think I've done that, I added in JavaScript and made all the links work. Hopefully the HTML and JavaScript and some of the CSS from the prototype will pop right into the JSP pages that present the working application.
Don't compromise on breadth
All pages covered (luckily there aren't too many). I could probably do more coverage of error messages and such though.
Compromise as much as you can on depth
Done. This is where I could really lose it though, by adding various search results pages, and long list of images. If we were doing more usability testing at this point, I'd feel a lot of pressure to go overboard on depth.
Overall my use of HTML prototypes is too much for some applications, but in this case starting with HTML helps move on development and design at the same time, and will save us QA later.