User Interface mock-ups - PHP Powered
User Interface Mock-ups and PHP
When the developers are busy with back-end works, in my free time I help them by writing the HTML and CSS coding for the UI myself. Sometimes this helps to ensure the UI design perfectly matches with my fair mock-up and cosmetic idea.
Currently I am working in a plugin module with myself (as Interaction and Experience designer) and Mangai (as core developer) as the team members. The works kick-started after we had a paper/image/storyboard session to capture the flows. She was busy with back-end works and I offered to write some HTML mock-ups for my UI designs. Interestingly, at some places I found that writing code for repeat-contents takes too long. Also it added many lines of code, making the code more complex to handle. In prototypes where you often change the design iteratively, the code should be easy to handle.
So I thought, If I could use some scripts to generate repeat contents the work load would be less. I thought of why not PHP?. Then I installed a PHP module in my apache and it started working. Now, I write few lines of PHP code inside my mockups to handle some repeat-contents. PHP is relatively easy to learn (atleast the basic things) and helps to design some interactive mockups quickly. 