RD2 has been immersed in prototyping with Expression Blend due to a perfect storm of opportunities in recent weeks. First, we have several clients that are taking a serious look at building web and line-of-business applications in Silverlight. We’ve also been working with a great team at Techsys that’s already well-versed in Silverlight workflows. Lastly, the new features of the upcoming versions of Silverlight and Blend have really shown a strong committment to facilitating user experience design and cross-discipline teamwork.

If you’re building Silverlight or WPF apps, then it’s pretty clear that doing your prototypes in Blend is a great choice. But I’m here to tell you that you might find Blend to be a great choice for prototyping regardless of the final product.

Generally you should strive to keep the technology behind your advanced prototypes as close to that of the final product as possible. I’m not trying to argue against that, but I also believe that the faster (and therefore cheaper) your prototypes are to produce, the more prototyping you’ll do, and that leads to a better informed development phase.

Paper and pencil are super fast, so we go through a lot of that at RD2. Very soon you want to get to the good stuff and begin to see things realized on screen. Current and soon-to-be-released features of Blend make on-screen prototype exploration very easy.

SketchFlow

SketchFlow is the biggie. It is a exploration-oriented and iteration-enabling framework in Expression Blend for tying in all sorts of assets into your application design process. Go watch this video. It is not in the current Blend 3 Preview, but it is scheduled for inclusion in the Blend 3 official release. SketchFlow seems to be such a comprehensive prototyping solution that it will probably render all of my remaining points irrelevant once it is released.

Importing Adobe Files

Most of my conversations with visual designers regarding the Expression Studio tools start with me explaining that it’s not really “Microsoft’s version of CS” and hit a few bumps when I explain that it’s Windows-only. That’s OK, because Blend is not a “everyone has to switch to Windows and use only Microsoft tools” situation. Blend 3 has importers for both Illustrator and Photoshop files. It doesn’t require any work on the part of the Adobe applications; it just works. There is also a great export plugin for Fireworks from Infragistics. I’ll cover more about these flows in another post.

Silverlight Navigation Framework

This is currently my favorite new feature in Silverlight. Tim Heuer published a great screencast of this new framework. It goes beyond prototyping, but it enables easy navigation between content and persistent URLs for specific views. This means you can take all of your prototype pages and link them up in a real navigation scenario pretty quickly. I will definitely be posting more about this.

I remember thinking when Fireworks CS3 came out that we were seeing a great step forward in the evolution of prototyping tools. Looking at Blend 3 makes me think this will be a giant leap forward.