Digital Product Prototyping

Making an Idea Concrete

A product idea can sound reasonable in conversation while leaving important questions unanswered. How would someone actually use it? What would change from the existing experience? Which parts of the current workflow could be reused, and which would need to change?

At LibreDigital, I created visual prototypes to help customers and internal teams evaluate proposed digital-publishing experiences before development. Rather than discussing an idea in the abstract, we could see how it might actually behave and use that experience to guide the conversation.

| The prototype wasn't the finished product. It was a way to make the right questions visible before building it.

Designing a Better Mobile Reading Experience for Digital Comics

Digital comic books already existed, but the reading experience had been designed primarily for larger screens. On a phone or tablet, reading dialogue could require zooming into an individual panel, zooming back out to locate the next panel, and repeating the process throughout the book.

I developed a proof of concept exploring how the interaction could be adapted for smaller screens. Instead of repeatedly returning readers to the full-page view, the proposed experience allowed them to move more naturally between panels. I also explored a text layer that could make dialogue readable without forcing readers to zoom away from the artwork.

The text layer also suggested a possible future enhancement: translated dialogue could potentially be displayed without requiring the original comic artwork to be edited for every language.

For the prototype, I created smartphone templates in Pencil, captured comic screenshots with Snagit, edited assets in Photoshop, and assembled the presentation in PowerPoint.

Prototyping a Blended Digital Textbook Experience

At the time, digital textbooks generally followed one of two models: a fixed-format replica that preserved the original page design, or reflowable text that adapted more easily to the screen but removed the original page context. Each approach offered benefits and tradeoffs.

LibreDigital already had a workflow for creating a blended digital experience for periodicals. I recognized that the same underlying approach could be adapted for academic content and created a proof of concept demonstrating how that experience could work for textbooks.

The prototype compared the existing fixed and reflowable experiences, explained the advantages and limitations of each, and then demonstrated a blended model along with proposed interface behavior and functionality.