As an interaction designer with a software engineering background, I usually bring ideas to life through coding. For those who don’t code, there are tools that offer a less technical approach, such as Quartz Composer (a nearly decade old visual programming language) and Origami (a new tool built by Facebook that streamlines Quartz Composer). The effort to make interaction design accessible to a broader set of people is a worthy cause, and crucial to the fast-paced live prototyping process at IDEO. That set me on a path to explore a new set of prototyping tools—ones that work for designers who don’t code. Taken together, Quartz Composer and Origami offer a set of basic interface building blocks called patches. It’s an inspired start, and I saw ways to build upon those tools and conceal some of their complexity. Enter Avocado. I started by creating a set of reusable patches that address common interaction patterns that are arduous to build from scratch. (via Neat Effects, No Code Required | IDEO Labs)