Decent Prototyping Tool - but better options existed for our workflow
January 21, 2020

Decent Prototyping Tool - but better options existed for our workflow

Matt Railey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Proto.io

We have used Proto.io as a workflow prototyping tool to illustrate interactions and steps as part of enterprise business application development. We use it in our practice. Specifically, I'm not sure if other design practices in our company handle it. (1 location of out of many locations of our business; each practice is free to use the tools it deems best for its work).
  • workflow process steps
  • simple interactions
  • complex transition animations
  • robust interactions
  • Allows for fast demonstration of workflows to stakeholders.
  • Is not an expensive tool, so minimal risk in experimenting with it.
In the end, we decided not to continue using Proto.io and instead use tools we were already using.
  • For just presenting workflows to stakeholders, InVision worked almost as well (not as robust in interactions, but when you want to focus on the steps, that's better anyway).
  • For micro-interactions and transition animations - tools like AdobeXD and FramerX, and even Figma and some plugins for Sketch are better.
We never reached out to Proto.io's support. I never encountered any bugs or issues while using the application, though, so I guess that says something about the quality of the product. We did notice that prototype interaction performance was noticeably slow/laggy when working with a complex prototype. We searched through the app's support forums and crawled the web and saw that other users had similar issues. The response from the company was to simplify the prototype, not ideal.

Do you think Proto.io delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Proto.io's feature set?

Yes

Did Proto.io live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Proto.io go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Proto.io again?

No

Proto.io is suitable for what I would call mid-fidelity prototyping. It's good at conveying steps in a workflow with decent facsimiles of interactions/transitions, but not high enough that you can pass it off as the real thing. It's not a bad tool, but we've found that it fills in a kind of useless space in our internal design process. We can get away with presenting the same kind of step-by-step workflow demonstration in InVision. For animation/micro-interaction prototyping, we can use AdobeXD or FramerX if working on a React project (or even non-React if we're designing components instead of trying to go straight to code).