Prototyping — the process in which a test version of a concept is created before commercialization — has never been more important. New digital products are being developed rapid fire, and a working sample is needed before anything else can happen.

But the process is not easy, as the disconnect between user-interface designers and programmers is wider than ever. It is often difficult for the vision to be turned into a functioning reality.

That is where ProtoPie comes in. The system, developed with funding from Posco Capital, Kolon Investment and Shinhan Investment, allows for the creation of a user interface without worrying about coding. The design tool interprets the art boards and generates code.

The Korea JoongAng Daily sat down with Kim to discuss the path that ProtoPie has taken and its future direction.




Q. To start off, people might not be accustomed to the exact meaning of prototyping and why it matters in the industry. Please explain the term and its significance.



A. Prototyping is a method to validate product ideas before the implementation process. It became popular for tech industries because the process could help avoid user-interface design flaws down the line which might cost you more time and money to fix later. According to the 2017 Design in Tech report by John Maeda, over 40 percent of startups fail because of product-market fit. Prototyping helps companies including startups to save engineering resources and time.



Then, what sets ProtoPie apart from other prototyping tools?



ProtoPie is a code-free prototyping tool, so designers can build product-like interactive prototypes without knowledge of coding. There are other tools out there like Framer. But you must learn code. Then, there are other sets of products, such as Principle, that are easy to use, but provide limited sources for making more sophisticated designs. I wanted to take the advantages of the existing toolkit while eliminating the weak points. ProtoPie can also utilize sensors and build prototypes running across devices and operating systems including Mac, Windows and Android. Nowadays, the product ecosystem is more important than product itself. Imagine the Uber app. In their ecosystem, different apps for each stakeholder exist; Uber driver app, passenger app, and management system. ProtoPie can help to prototype all interactions across those digital devices.



How did your experience as a Google designer affect the development of ProtoPie?



At Google, designers work under high time pressure and wear multiple hats. It is common for one designer to handle multiple projects at a time as I did in the position between 2010 and 2014. This is why efficient and easy prototyping tools are critical for designers. But as I mentioned before, the existing tools at the time didn't fully fulfill the needs.



Many Korean start-ups struggle to go global. But ProtoPie has the majority of revenues coming from outside of Korea. How was it made possible?



We targeted the global market rather than a specific country from the beginning. Our first customer came from Vietnam when we had just commercialized ProtoPie in 2017. Big companies like Google and Apple first approached us before we promoted our product. This year, we targeted North America and are going to run various marketing campaigns. Over 80 percent of revenue comes from outside of Korea, and the United States is the top market at 45 percent. Besides the United States, the European region is the second largest, with Germany and U.K having great shares. In total, we now serve 15,000 enterprises from 100 countries, alongside individual customers.



Is ProtoPie mainly used for designing an app or are there other use cases?



Some designers are using the tool for apps but others come from home appliance makers or automotive sector. We released functions tailored for the automotive industry so that designers could preview the final result of display interface in cars. Recently, we signed a contract with a major German automobile company, although we are not allowed to reveal the name. We're going to expand to other specific industries depending on market needs; like home appliances and Internet of Things.



Are there any new features that you want to add on ProtoPie?



We're focusing on the prototyping area to win this market. We keep pushing new features to improve expressiveness and collaboration features to fill the gap between designers and engineers.

New digital products are being developed rapidly and the process is not easy, the disconnect between UI designers and programmers, turning visions into functioning realities. That is where ProtoPie comes in.

Not Your Prototypical Prototyping, ProtoPie's CEO Says

This original post was an interview of Tony Kim, CEO and cofounder of ProtoPie, by 

How did you get started in interactive design and learn the necessary skills?

I actually started out in web design back in the late ’90s, when everything felt flat and static. Then, I became really interested in interactions and pushing the design as far as it could go. So, getting more into interaction design wasn’t so much a conscious choice, but an evolution. The more I saw the potential, the more I realized that interactions aren’t just beautiful design—they are a means for much more effective communication.

When and why did you decide to launch the prototyping tool

At the time, web design was quite problematic in that you had to know how to code in order to bring an idea to life. That made it hard for people to communicate their ideas. During my time at development company NAVER Corporation, I noticed that this difficulty in communicating was harming the potential of what we could do. When I moved to Google, I was working with people from all over the world, and that added an extra layer of complexity. I realized that human language is incomplete; it trips us when we’re trying to share and build ideas. With ProtoPie, I wanted to create a universal language for interactive design—something that could translate complex ideas in a far more effective and diplomatic way.

How do you hope ProtoPie will empower digital product designers?

ProtoPie is not only about making people’s jobs easier, but it’s also about pushing ideas further. It’s about enabling designers to achieve their ideas and making the end result as true to the original idea and as true to life as possible. Previously, if a designer wanted to prototype interactions between a mobile app and their smartphone’s gyroscope, they would need to fake it. With ProtoPie, a single designer can make that interaction happen easily and seamlessly. It’s a tool to bring ideas to life without barriers.

ProtoPie recently launched Class Support, an initiative that gives students around the world free licenses to the platform. What kind of opportunities does this present to students?

It’s a cliché to say that students are the future, but it’s also true. Years ago, my generation of designers became comfortable with Adobe’s design products because we were able to get hold of bootleg copies and submerge ourselves in them. We were able to experiment and play. Unless students have access to software, we’re limiting them and, in some ways, ourselves. There is so much potential in this younger generation. They don’t have the same constraints as we do—be it time or clients. They’re on a different timeline, free to explore and experiment. I want them to use the software in a way that I can’t even imagine, to make things we don’t even know we need. It’s exciting to think that they could leave university and take a real living, breathing prototype to a future employer. I’m excited to see what this generation will bring to the tech and design community. Seeing what they can do is a wonderful kind of pressure for the whole design world.

"Stay open to feedback and activity, and seek insight from users."

What is the connection between design and engineering, and why is it important to you?

For me, design and engineering are like siblings. They’re both in pursuit of the same goal: to build something seamless, usable and effective, and to build a product that has every key piece working together to achieve one goal. The importance of this lies not with us as the creators, but for the end user who sees—or, even better, doesn’t even notice—how well it fits into their life.

What emerging technologies and innovations will have the biggest impact on how you design in the next few years?

Right now, all our devices speak different languages. The fridge speaks German, the car speaks Italian and the washing machine speaks English. As users, we have to be fluent in all of these languages. Though they don’t communicate with each other as well as they could or should, I think the internet of things will be at the forefront of every piece of design. It’s an incredible time for designers to imagine how one app can integrate with tech; right now, this feels like a gimmick or an added bonus, but we’re approaching a time when this connectivity will be the standard. That’s when things are going to get really interesting—when a platform or an app no longer lives in a silo, but as a cog in a bigger machine.

What is the most exciting work in interaction design that you’ve seen recently?

The relationship and integration of digital design and hardware such as Raspberry Pi. Watching how creatives and engineers are combining the two things in pursuit of their own designs is incredibly exciting. These designers, makers and tinkerers are grasping the future.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given in your career?

Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This may be partially true, but to invent or create something truly innovative, you have to start with users’ feedback—verbal or nonverbal. That’s the advice I follow and give: Stay open to feedback and activity, and seek insight from users.

Also, I often get asked whether to study code or not. My take is: no. If you have extra time, I’d invest that time in studying business or service design. This will give you the ability to see and draw a holistic picture of the ecosystem in which a product belongs. For example, let’s say you’re working on an Uber app. You should care about the driver, passenger and operator, especially how they interact with each other and what motivates each one. Leave the coding to no-code creation tools such as ProtoPie and focus on designing the interactions that will drive success for your product.

Interactive designer Tony Kim created ProtoPie, a prototyping tool, to help the next generation of digital designers innovate the industry.

Grasping the Future

Tony jumpstarted his design career at Naver, Korea's own counterpart of Google, where he was the UX team manager and senior designer leading major projects in both Seoul, Korea and Beijing, China. Later on, he moved to Google, where he played a major role in designing new digital products for Google Search aimed at a global audience. After being at Google for almost half a decade, he decided to start a company of his own fulfilling his dream of making the easiest highly interactive prototyping tool that would empower digital product designers all over the world.


Here, Tony discusses the issues of communication and how language isn't always the answer.



I can't speak. Well, not all the time at least. Sometimes I find it difficult to express myself...I'm in between what I want to say and what I’m actually saying. For example, in Korean, we have a word, 눈치 – Noon-chi, which I can’t translate. The best I can do is say that it’s a description of the ability to be in touch with someone’s feelings. Which sounds, one, very clunky in English, and two, a lot like empathy. But it isn’t empathy, and unless you know Korean, I can't fully explain the emotion of the word. It just doesn’t come across the same. I’m sure you have something similar in your own language; words that aren’t translatable. Words that, no matter how hard you try, people outside your culture just can’t understand. And this is just with a simple word. Now imagine communicating an idea. Something as rich and complex as that. How can we possibly find the words to adequately express an idea? Maybe we can’t. Think of all the beautiful ideas that haven’t come to life just because you couldn’t describe them.

Let me give you a personal example. At the start of my career, I was a designer at Google, Korea. I typically communicated my ideas to different international teams. But I frequently had communication issues where one team took my idea one way, and another took it a different way. I was left in between the two, and not sure how to clear up the confusion. I couldn’t communicate, not efficiently anyways. I tried everything. I thought it was an issue with my English - that because I wasn’t a native speaker, my ideas weren’t understandable. So, I went to my colleagues in Korea and asked for help finding more descriptive English words. I actually tried the thesaurus and the dictionary, searching for words to better express myself, and came up short. Eventually, I realised that I was trying to solve my communication problem with language, but what if the problem was, in fact, language?

You know the term full professional proficiency, right? Essentially, it means I can work in a language that isn't my native language. So, for example, I’m writing this in English, my second language. So that’s full professional proficiency, right? Well, sort of. I may use English every day, but regardless of how proficient I am, I still have difficulty expressing my ideas to my colleagues. Why? Because, language isn’t always the solution to communication problems.

I’m in the business of ideas, and what I’ve learned is that the ideas we have in our head are high-fidelity. They are multi-dimensional. We don’t just see ideas. We smell them, touch them, and imagine them in their entirety. We have ideas that words can’t express. The only way to be sure ideas are communicated - and communicated well - is to visualise them. Because when we imagine ideas, they aren’t one-dimensional like language, they’re visual. It’s why I rely so heavily on prototyping; it stops me from becoming lost in translation and helps me communicate my ideas in a tangible way. It’s not abstract and it leaves nothing to external interpretation.

For an idea to live, it can’t just be heard; it has to be seen, touched, interacted with, built upon, and fully developed. Because words fail us and they always will. Ideas are more than sentences and grammar. To clearly communicate ideas we need a universal language that everyone will understand - an interactive visual language. One based on prototyping. If you want to truly see your idea live, not just outside of your head, but in the hands of others, prototype it. Then it will speak for itself.

CEO and co-founder of Studio XID Korea Inc, Tony Kim, on communication issues and how language isn't always the answer

When Words Fail You, Stop Using Them

 It’s a question I ask my connected kitchen most days, as I make my morning cup of tea. It’s 2020 and here I am, able to ask my kitchen for the weather forecast. Amazing, without a doubt, but sadly, that’s where the conversation ends.

When we look back on the last decade, it’s incredible to see what we’ve been able to accomplish. We’ve witnessed the rise of the iPhone, the start of Tesla and SpaceX, and the development of Crispr. Our lives look and feel completely different from the way they were even five short years ago. But while so much is developing at lightning speed, the role of voice technology is being sadly relegated to an afterthought. There are, of course, the occasional updates: where my connected kitchen was once just about able to manage my timers, it’s now able to transcribe my grocery lists. That’s progress, of sorts, but in light of other world-changing innovations, what I want to know is when is voice technology going to fulfill its potential?

The unfulfilled promise: when will voice catch-up?

So if five years can give us world-changing innovations, when is voice technology going to catch up? Imagine all of the things we could do with voice technology outside of setting a timer and asking about the weather. It’s foreseeable that voice technology is going to become a key feature of our everyday lives. Children are growing up asking Alexa to turn down the lights and demanding Google Assistant message their parents about dinner. The tactile functionality of the past will be replaced with interactive, intuitive voice technology. Yet incredibly enough, the future of voice technology still feels like it’s lying just out of reach and its life-changing potential eluding us.

This future is a world in which I can speak my native Korean to English colleagues and my language will be translated in real-time. It’s a world where your phone describes to you in perfect detail the way an image looks. Or a world in which your home speaker notices changes in your mood by how you speak to it, by the tone of your voice. The possibilities of voice technology are expansive, and not too far away from our current reality.

Contextual design and natural language search

What we’re currently lacking is contextual UX design that accommodates natural language search. It’s this ability to respond to how we actually speak that can lead to everyday advancements such as shopping lists that surface related items, or the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances such as the current Covid-related need for non-contact ordering in restaurants, or voice recognition payment facilities. What we’re currently lacking is a conversation.

At the other end of the spectrum, voice technology can facilitate a far more empathic relationship with the technology around us, responding to the deep-rooted human need for more meaningful relationships – even with our tech. Imagine an emotional support AI, on hand to not only help you with the daily basics but provide intuitive feedback from a caregiving perspective.

It’s well established that our tone of voice conveys almost as much as the words we choose. Integrating this level of understanding into the everyday items around us could change the face of how society responds to mental health needs or how we facilitate care for our elderly relatives.

Finding a collective voice and diversity of thought

As with all innovation, there have to be multiple brains on the job. Meaning, we need ideas from a diverse set of people. For meaningful progress, designers have to be able to prototype, experiment, and play. It’s no different with voice integration. For us to make strides forward in voice tech, designers need tools to explore all of the possibilities. Right now, that’s proving to be difficult as there aren’t enough programs and tools available with voice integration.

The reality is that information architecture and interface design should be approached differently for voice than for touch/tap. Yet as it stands, there are a select few teams that specialize in voice tech that operates inside large tech companies. Those are the only people who are currently developing voice features and functionality. The emerging technology isn’t accessible to designers in a broad sense, which slows down the progress we could collectively be making. In order to get that spark of innovation in voice, access to prototyping with voice needs to become more democratized, so that creative thinkers around the world can have equal access to it.

Make no mistake, the current lack of progress isn’t down to a lack of investment or financial resources, rather a limited vision. If, rather than the closed-door approach we’re seeing as a result of big tech monopolies, hundreds of thousands of designers were able to collectively work on progressing voice functionality, we’d be guaranteed to innovate at a much faster rate than any of those small teams could, regardless of the size of company they sit within.

We’re already working with several car manufacturers to enhance the in-car experience through voice functionality. Interestingly, none of the features will be new to us, yet how we interact with them – from how we speak to our GPS to how we set-up the climate – will be radically different. It’s through hands-free engagement with all instruments that we will improve passenger comfort and safety. Had we not been able to integrate voice into the design process, each iteration would have taken twice as long and resulted in a sense of add-on functionality as opposed to an intuitive integrated design.

The future of voice technology as it could be is right around the corner. We’ve seen the majority of modern households, as well as most workplaces, adopt smart, voice-enabled devices. So, with the future staring us in the face, it’s time to meet it head-on by giving designers the tools they need to experiment, play, test, and prototype voice technology. When more people are able to share and build off each other’s ideas, innovation for voice will finally flow.

The difference in having a democratized prototyping ability is the difference between stagnation and innovation. When more people have access, more people play, experiment, and build. With prototyping, ideas are able to come to life, and with voice prototyping, what once needed to be described through painstaking lines of code can now speak for itself.

The future of voice technology is right around the corner. It’s time to meet it head-on by giving designers the tools to experiment, play, test, and prototype voice technology.

Let’s Talk About More Than the Weather

Have you seen the new iPhone? Beautiful piece of design, almost completely button-less, a joy for the eyes. 

As technology progresses and designs become more minimal, one fundamental aspect of accessibility starts to fade away: the 

experience. Visually impaired people cannot experience design the same way as we do – and in fact, as mentioned below, 

, about his opinion on technology, innovation and accessibility. 

Here's why voice technology can bridge all these things together

Giving the blind Voice. Functionality that’s more than a feature, it’s a necessity.

The new iPhone is coming out, and it’s almost completely button-less

. Every year, new technologies are released with increasingly sleek designs. As we move forward in innovation, buttons and tactile aspects of technology are being forgone for smooth surfaces.

a huge leap forward in tech is leaping past a group of people who need the coarseness of old technology; the blind

. Microwaves without dials, washing machines without knobs, clocks without buttons, and phones without, well, much of 

The visually impaired operate in a completely different world where they need to 

, and with technology continually innovating the tactile out of the equation, they are left behind. 

But the issue here isn’t the technology itself

. No, innovation and the strides we have made with technology are remarkable. It’s the fact that we’ve taken a path in which 

innovation and accessibility aren’t hand-in-hand

. But all of this can change, and rather simply.

, we’ve seen a bridge in the world of tech, where sleek designs can live alongside accessibility. Now, 

visually impaired people can talk to their devices instead of searching for haptic-responses or buttons

. However, with the functionality of Siri and Google Assistant that we have today, we’re 

Voice technology has incredible potential, especially when it comes to accessibility. I

nstead of asking your phone the weather for the day, maybe it could describe to you exactly what the sky looks like in novel-esque detail

. Maybe when your daughter FaceTimes you, you are met with a description of her facial expressions as they change throughout the conversation. Maybe if you accidentally burn your hand on a hot stove, 

your voice assistant can immediately recognize your sounds of distress and call a neighbor for you

. This and more are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to voice technology, and all of these ideas should be explored more thoroughly.

For progress to be made within voice tech, 

designers, programmers, and creative thinkers alike all need to have access to programs that allow for play, experimentation, and prototyping

. For truly creative solutions to accessibility problems, a diversity of thought, even from outside the realm of voice designers, is necessary.

We need people from all walks of life to be able to build ideas that inspire others. We need 

collaboration, and we need tools that allow for empathetic design exploration

. With the popularity of prototyping software, there are hundreds of thousands of designers excited to manipulate and integrate voice into their prototypes, allowing for an increase in novel, thoughtful, accessible design.

. No matter how devices will change in design and function in the future, our ability to talk with our technology isn’t going away. In this way, the visually impaired will have greater access to new technology as voice tech improves and progresses.

With the expansion and distribution of prototyping software that allows designers to integrate voice functionality, 

accessibility and innovation will once again be hand-in-hand

How voice technology addresses the loss of tactile experience for the visually impaired as tech progresses and designs become more minimal.

Giving Voice to the Blind—Why Innovation Defies Accessibility

There’s so much talk about where ideas come from — what inspires them and how to keep them flowing. Call me uninspired, but I think that’s the wrong question. Instead of where they’re coming from, I’m more interested in where those ideas are going.

Once you have a killer idea, what’s next? That’s the curious question mark for me.

Throughout time, we’ve invented so many ways to describe inspiration. We’ve personified it with the Greek Muses or the Norse Kvasir. We credit divine inspiration or a whisper in a dream.

Sometimes we say that an idea is inspired by the natural world as George de Mestral did. He said the idea for Velcro sprung into his mind seeing how the tiny hooks of cockle-burs clung to his dog’s fur as they hiked the Swiss Alps. Eureka! Idea acquired! That’s enough right?

Well, my Jordans don’t have Velcro straps because de Mestral had the idea for Velcro. It’s because he did something with that idea. He first got it out of his head. Probably told his wife. He probably took some notes and drew some sketches. He probably also made a few prototypes.

Basically, having an idea is one thing, but holding that idea in your hand, that’s something really special.

Now, you may be about ready to promote me from 1st Lieutenant Plain as Day to Captain Obvious, but please hold your horses. I know it sounds simple; get ideas out of your head. But there’s some nuance to unpack here, and I want to draw your attention to a few traps you might fall into. Traps I’ve climbed out of a few hundred times.

Tell me. What do you do when you’re excited about an idea? I bet you tell your colleague or a friend or your husband. And how does that feel? Good? Dopamine rush when you see their expression change listening to you? Adrenaline pumping when you feel their excitement? All those neurological rewards wash over you like you’ve just made something great.

But check yourself. You haven’t made anything yet.

Impressing people with your ideas feels great, but it can be dangerous. Because telling people can actually be so satisfying that you lose interest in actually making the idea. I bet that’s pretty familiar, right? So if you have a great idea, tell people. But don’t stop there.

Ok, so then you grab your notebook — you know, the one with page after page of good ideas you’ve had. You know the one. It’s just like those others on your bookshelf also filled with pages and pages of good ideas you earmarked to get back to someday…

See what I’m saying? I think you’re picking up what I’m laying down. I’m totally guilty of this too.

Back at Google, I was obsessed with documenting my ideas. I filed them away in neatly labeled categories, waiting for the moment when I would get back to them (I was so sure I would get back to them).

The problem is that it’s so easy to lie to yourself. The sad truth is that I may as well have just neatly labeled different trashcans in my office. Because I went back through those notebooks almost as much as I rummage through the garbage (I’ve never been known to do this).

It felt good to write down the ideas in my notebook. I took pride in those notebooks. Those leather-bound idea graveyards. Those dot-grid idea purgatories. But, if I’m honest, I was just lying to myself.

I thought that writing down my ideas was one step closer to making them. In reality, it was one giant leap toward forgetting them. What did I do as soon as I had written it down? I turned the page. (Take that literally or metaphorically. Both apply here.)

So if you have a great idea, write it down or sketch it. Definitely. But don’t let that beginning be the end.

Gut check moment. Are you guilty of any of this? That’s ok. We all are. The question is: what should we do about it? Clearly, the secret isn’t just getting an idea out of your head; it’s about getting it into a format that gives you the best chance of actually holding that idea in your hand.

Now I may be a little biased — my company is called 

 after all — but I’m telling you that’s a prototype. Wherever and whenever possible, you should be turning your ideas into prototypes.

If you want to make your idea better, make a prototype. It’s a format that encourages critique. A prototype tells everyone you show it to: “I am a work in progress.”

Instead of just enthusiasm or apathy, you’re likely to get opinions — actual usable feedback. That can be daunting, especially if the idea is precious to you, but remember — if you love your idea, you want to create the best possible version of it.

If you want to rally support for your idea, make a prototype. It suggests to colleagues, peers, friends that you are taking this idea seriously. It shows a commitment to realizing your vision, and that excitement is contagious.

If you want to focus on your idea, make a prototype. This isn’t scribbles in the margin, destined to be forgotten. It’s a manifestation. You can see it, interact with it, touch it. It demands attention – yours and others.

If you want to sell your idea, make a prototype. A prototype is something everyone can believe in.

If you want to become haunted by, possessed by, obsessed with, fanatical for, engrossed with, and absorbed by your idea, make a prototype. Ok, to be fair, this one feels a bit extreme. But seriously, it’s hard not to be passionate about a prototype.

Over the past few years, my colleagues and I have been obsessed with an idea of our own: making it as easy as possible to translate a design idea into a highly functional prototype — and we keep having new ideas to improve the design process.

I’d love to tell you what inspires those ideas. Where those ideas come from. However, honestly, I don’t give a damn about that. So instead I’ll end with an idea that’s more of the instructional than the inspirational variety.

Don't kill your ideas before you can act on them.

Notebooks Are Leather-bound Graveyards for Your Ideas

Written by Tony Kim, co-founder and CEO of 

An idea in your head is like gold still in the ground. If it’s stuck in the walls of the mine, its only value is potential value. You have to dig it up, get it out, bring it to the surface. You get it above ground, and even at that point, it’s only just a commodity. Because it’s what you do with it next that determines its true value. Shaped into a necklace, gilded on a statue, drawn into wire, its value is how you use it.

So why do we do this to ourselves? We have these nuggets in our brains that we hold on to and protect because maybe someday they’ll be fully formed and ready to share with the world? Good luck.

Or maybe because truly revolutionary ideas are hard to explain, even to yourself perhaps. Can you even capture it in words? Is it a picture in your head that you’re struggling to describe? To communicate with others? Is it fear? Fear that you’ll be judged by the rough ore of an idea you pull out because it’s not one of these shiny, polished ideas that others claim came to them completely?

Because it’s hard? Because it’s vulnerable? Because it’s personal?

I’ve thought about this tremendously over the last ten years. What is this friction that keeps good ideas just sitting in our brains, left to die? The more I looked at it and reflected on my own experiences, the more important it became to me. I realized that, with no exaggeration, the most powerful ideas to change our world are likely sitting in our collective minds right now — unexpressed, unexplored, and unappreciated.

How much more could we achieve collectively if we could erase this friction? If we could more easily share those ideas, they would add to the “compound ideation” that drives us forward so much more than any individual’s imagination.

So I left Google and set out to reduce the difficulty of expressing and improving ideas. Teaming up with two partners from Samsung and Naver, we started 

. ProtoPie is our vision of a prototyping tool to help individuals and companies understand, communicate and realize their best ideas. It’s funny. We built a robust and powerful prototyping tool, even though we don’t ultimately care about prototypes. We care about realizing ideas, and we see prototyping as an integral part of that.

ProtoPie was particularly challenging to explain early on (like many good ideas seem to be). When we first pitched the alpha version of the software to investors and the tech community, they assumed ProtoPie was a visualization tool — something to translate UX design concepts into more tangible visual aids. They saw it as a wireframing app or a piece of animation software. And while it could, and can, certainly do those things, we always saw it as something more.

We believed that if it were easier to get those ideas out and into a sharable format, then ProtoPie would be a very effective communication tool. So instead of exploring just how the software could be better for the UX design process in showing animations and interactions, we asked deeper questions about linguistics and cognition.

We wondered if language itself was a barrier to sharing our ideas as we imagine them. We thought “are our words failing to capture our ideas?” So we developed a new language. One that’s universal. With ProtoPie, you create prototypes not with a manufactured coding language, but with a simple, intuitive workflow that feels more human than machine. No matter what language or languages you speak, your prototypes become a universally understandable window into your head. It allows those ideas to be more easily expressed, explored, improved upon, appreciated and realized.

And today, the tech community doesn’t need any convincing. Thousands of the world’s top designers and thinkers, working on cutting-edge teams at Microsoft, Google, OnePlus, HBO, BMW, and so many more are using our software not just for interaction design and building prototypes, but to communicate their ideas and bring their best ideas to life.

Eduardo Sonnino, senior designer at Surface who worked on the new Surface Duo & Neo.

Eduardo Sonnino, a senior designer at Microsoft, told us that 

 has changed the way his team thinks and works. He said that just a few years ago, they would put together 100-slide presentations to try to explain an idea. Now, he told us, they just hand over a single prototype built in ProtoPie. That means they spend more time evaluating and improving the ideas instead of wasting time just trying to explain them.

Many of the first major companies to embrace 

 have been tech firms in Silicon Valley. They were already familiar with UX design, and it was easy to demonstrate the value of ProtoPie to them. But now, we’re seeing the next wave of adoption, and it looks completely different.

In the last couple of years, companies big and small all over the world have realized that user experience design isn’t a tech term. It’s more of a mindset of allowing your ideas to be changed and improved by engaging the audience to touch them, respond to them, and co-create them. And the community is showing us just what’s possible with ProtoPie.

, and more. Industries that are so diverse in their needs, but are all finding common ground in understanding the value of collaborative ideation. ProtoPie is helping them express their ideas faster and more effectively. We believe that there’s truly no limit to the positive impact that can and will, create globally.

ProtoPie itself is still very much a prototype. We are working every day to improve the software. Our focus today, as it has always been, is on making, expressing, and improving ideas more fluidly. Recently, we’ve launched a new suite of tools in ProtoPie that make it the only prototyping tool suitable for enterprise-level collaborative prototyping. We have our ideas about how impactful the update is going to be. But if we’ve learned anything since starting this journey, it’s that the community will always take your ideas further than you could have imagined.

Is our job done? No, definitely not. There are still some ideas trapped in my own mind I’m trying to express. But what I’m certain of is that the tools we’re developing aren’t just going to unlock my own ideas, but to help you unlock and express yours as well. Like I said, I know you have a bunch of world-changing ideas stuck in your head. Now that you can express them, let’s see what they become.

I’m 100% sure you have a bunch of great ideas. Unfortunately, if they’re stuck in your head, they’re effectively worthless.

May No Idea Be Left to Die

 from Asia Times and translated under her permission.

“ProtoPie aims to solve the big communication problem all designers deal with”

This is what Tony Kim said, the CEO of Studio XID, Inc., located in the Gangnam area in Seoul, known as the Silicon Valley of Korea.

interaction prototyping tool for designers, named ProtoPie

. ProtoPie enables designers to explain interactive design ideas and animations intuitively and easily. For example, it is rather tricky to explain interactions with drawings or static screen designs. 

However, by using ProtoPie, designers can build highly interactive prototypes easily that resemble real apps without any help from engineers

. In short, Photoshop is a static graphic tool, but ProtoPie is a tool for designing complex interactions and animations easily.

Kim emphasized that digital product designers always suffer from lack of time and resources while they want to work on other design ideas they have in mind. “Designers are supposed to come up with great designs in a rather limited period of time. Due to this, they often don’t have enough time to spend on interactions, that are crucial in one’s experience with a product. Consequently, project roll back or failure occur frequently because of poorly thought-out interactions and insufficient communication between designers and engineers.”

Then, he explained that the idea of ProtoPie started when he worked at Google and Naver (largest internet company in Korea) as an interaction designer. “I worked at Google until 2014. At that time, Google had about 200 designers all over the world. The pool of designers was pretty small considering the broad spectrum of products Google offered. In most cases, designers had to deal with multiple projects simultaneously. Ergo, they didn’t have time for prototyping. The issue here is not whether designers can write code to build prototypes. However, it’s the time restriction designers have for each project that plays a role here. I wish I had a tool such as ProtoPie to streamline my work process when I was still at Google.”

After a long period consisting of heavy beta testing with big tech companies such as Alibaba, the commercial launch took place in January 2017. Within a short period of time, ProtoPie has been adopted by designers in more than 30 countries working for major companies including Google, Yahoo!, LINE, Nintendo, Kakao and Allianz.

Tony Kim co-founded Studio XID in December 2014 and initiated the development of ProtoPie 3 months later, in March 2017.

“Scotty Kim, CTO, was a lead engineer and my colleague when I was dispatched to Naver China. I believed that he could implement my idea since he and I spent much time working together. He knew exactly the problems I encountered as a designer. John Song, CSO, was a principal engineer at startup incubator FuturePlay and decided to help building a demo version of ProtoPie during the incubator program I joined. When I finished this incubator program, I convinced him to join the team. Finally, we were with three and we co-founded Studio XID together.”

Kim highlighted that for startups hiring good teammates (NOT employees) is the most important thing. “When we hire an engineer, we always suggest to work together for a small project. It’s a period during which we mutually test the waters. This way, we and the candidate can see whether there is a fit. Some candidates don’t have the skills we seek even though they have great achievements on their CVs and vice versa. Currently, we have a very skilled team of engineers. If I would sum up the years of professional experience of our engineers, the total number of years surpasses 100 years.”

The company philosophy is that everything amongst team members should be transparent, except for salary. Bad news is always shared within the team without any filtering. Moreover, each team member has an equal vote when it comes to informed decision making, meaning that Studio XID maintains a decentralized decision making process. Once the decision has been made, the team moves in the same direction.

“In order to being on the same page, we argue like crazy. Since we work with 2-month sprints, we have bimonthly marathon meetings defining specifications for future versions of ProtoPie that could take up the entire day and night. We don’t encourage abuse, but we can discuss aggressively and passionately, hahaha.”

Finally, Kim closes off by stating that the team doesn’t hesitate in reversing decisions for the sake of success. “We reverse a decision if we found a good reason to do so. I believe that’s part of the nature of startups.”

Press Release