How I Made a Lo-Fi Smartphone Prototype

 

The video above shows a simple prototype for an Android Wear app, running on an an LG G watch R, which I created within a few hours of coming up with the concept — with ZERO CODING.

Concept

The idea of the app is to show the user the names (and faces) of other people attending a meeting. The purpose is to help people, like me, who have trouble remembering names and faces. The user can discreetly look at the watch while in the meeting.

NOTE: This is just a concept! I only wanted to demonstrate how a low-fi Android Wear prototype can be made quickly.

Method

After coming up with the idea, I created several different sketches using Balsamiq Mockups.

balsamiq sketch
After getting an idea of the “flow” of the app, it was time to move on to a clickable prototype. For this I used Pixate Studio for Windows.

I had to play around with Pixate a bit to get the interaction I wanted.

pixate animation

Obviously, the prototype is sketchy/low-fidelity, and the interactions are unfinished, but it was rapidly created, and could be quickly handed over to developers or other stakeholders. Hopefully this gives you an idea of how you can create such a prototype yourself.