Most of the large features we launch on the site involve multiple rounds of usability testing. I've been responsible for building most of the prototypes for testing.

Flash, Actionscript and XML

Because of our limited resources, we usually only have one lab to test most features. Because of this, I like to build prototypes that are fairly high-fidelity - we try to test the design, architecture and flow.

While I probably wouldn't ever recommend it for the Hotwire website, I chose flash as a prototyping tool. It allowed us to build something that looked like an html interface, develop rapidly and simulate how our website works. Actionscript allowed us to respond to user input and load data from an external xml file.

Skills

More work I did at Hotwire...