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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently running a very similar thing over at Atlassian. I was brought in to run their prototyping, and one of the things I immediately noticed is many of the designers didn't have the tools they needed to make proper prototypes. Rather than just teach them on invision/atomic/principal, I figured it'd be better to just teach them how to do front end dev. We're now holding lessons for a 2 hour block every week in 10 week cycles, and that seems to be the best for people schedule wise. Originally we did all day courses but too many people had conflicts. Course notes are here if anyone is interested: http://prototype.guide - also includes a small electron server to help dynamically compile stylus/pug.

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This strikes me as the wrong approach. Front End Dev can be but it not usually that great of a prototyping tool.

Doing it this way they'll end up spending time working on things that aren't designing (fixing css bugs, etc).

Also Prototyping tools overlap more with how many designers think (the tools are made for designers), while html/css/js overlaps more with how programmers think (the technologies are made for programmers).

I think you're right if the designers would only end up using code for their prototypes. One of the things I really try to teach is to use the right level of prototyping for what you're trying to test (whether that be paper, clickthrough, or code prototypes). The reality though is that you don't really need courses for paper and tool-based prototyping. Invision and other tools out there have done a great job in being quickly learnable and easy to use. Front end dev however is a different beast. But if you're designing micro-interactions and anything with a lot of motion it can be really tricky to do those without code. By teaching the designers to code, it allows them to cover all ends of the spectrum when creating prototypes. Also it lets them communicate with the engineers in a much deeper way - very valuable since Atlassian has been a very engineering based company for a long time.

When you say "atomic", do you mean atomic design as popularized by Brad Frost? [1] Are you using atomic design or some other design system?

[1] http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/

Based on context (being in a list with Invision) I think they mean the prototyping tool Atomic: https://atomic.io/

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