Prototype Windows Phone App in SketchFlow

Download the template project from GitHub.

[This post got a mention on Microsoft Channel 9 This Week]

SketchFlow is one of the best prototyping tools available. SketchFlow is part of Blend which is now an integrated tool with Visual Studio. Those who have exposure to Blend, WPF/Silverlight developers, SketchFlow comes as natural extension to quickly prototype app ideas. Other prototyping tools are – Pencil, Balsamiq,Axure, SmartDraw, Visio etc. Recently, I wrote an introductory post about open source prototyping tool, Pencil, with example navigation flow screens. In my experience I found SketchFlow to be very efficient in creating high-fidelity prototypes. SketchFlow provides free form screens to create any type of prototypes – web site, web app, SPI, desktop app, or smartphone apps. This is powerful. But, with great power comes great boilerplate work :D. I so needed some kind of Windows Phone specific template project in SketchFlow which I could use to quickly draw my pages in and let template take care of generic phone specific look and feel (interactions). I didn’t find one. So I created one. This project template gives, out-of-the-box, phone frame images, dummy keyboard with interactive states, back button, and home button. The phone frame images included are – Windows Phone emulator stock image, Nokia Lumia 925, Nokia Lumia 1520, and HTC One. Android phones and iPhone (available now) are in plans.

Watch this video for a quick go through of the project and also to know how you can swap phone frames in seconds, throughout all prototype screens in the project:

Following are some of the screen shots of the project in action:

And yes, with my other project you can create prototypes for iPhone in Microsoft SketchFlow.

Happy mocking-up! 😀