Why I moved on from Figma – No Handoff
A good looking artifact too early in the process gains buy-in too quickly and kills discovery.
Link tags: prototyping
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Design notes on the 2023 Wikipedia redesign
So then the question becomes: how do you most effectively communicate designs, to facilitate the best discussions about those designs? My answer is: lots of little prototypes built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Craft — PaulStamatiou.com
I often use the word quality when referring to apps, products and services I hold in a high regard but another word that often comes up in this context is craft. Craft, as in something that is handcrafted where something someone spent a lot of time on and maybe even embedded their own personal touches and personality in it. Often something handcrafted feels more premium.
Fermented Code: Modelling the Microbial Through Miso - Serpentine Galleries
Y’know, I started reading this great piece by Claire L. Evans thinking about its connections to systems thinking, but I ended up thinking more about prototyping. And microbes.
The Demo → Demo Loop - daverupert.com
I’m 100% convinced that working demo-to-demo is the secret formula to making successful creative products.
Paper Prototype CSS
A stylesheet to imitate paper—perfect for low-fidelity prototypes that you want to test.
You Don’t Need A UI Framework — Smashing Magazine
We noticed a trend: students who pick a UI framework like Bootstrap or Material UI get off the ground quickly and make rapid progress in the first few days. But as time goes on, they get bogged down. The daylight grows between what they need, and what the component library provides. And they wind up spending so much time trying to bend the components into the right shape.
I remember one student spent a whole afternoon trying to modify the masthead from a CSS framework to support their navigation. In the end, they decided to scrap the third-party component, and they built an alternative themselves in 10 minutes.
This tracks with my experience. These kinds of frameworks don’t save time; they defer it.
The one situation where that works well, as Josh also points out, is prototyping.
If the goal is to quickly get something up and running, and you don’t need the UI to be 100% professional, I do think it can be a bit of a time-saver to quickly drop in a bunch of third-party components.
Benjamin Parry~ Writing ~ Engineering a better design test ~ @benjaminparry
It sometimes feels like we end up testing the limitations of our tools rather than the content and design itself.
What Benjamin found—and I heartily agree—is that HTML prototypes give you the most bang for your buck:
At the point of preparing for usability testing, it seemed ludicrous to move to any prototyping material other than the one we were already building in. The bedrock of the web: HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Hacks Are Fine / Matt Hogg FYI
If you employ a hack, don’t be so ashamed. Don’t be too proud, either. Above all, don’t be lazy—be certain and deliberate about why you’re using a hack.
I agree that hacks for prototyping are a-okay:
When it comes to prototypes, A/B tests, and confirming hypotheses about your product the best way to effectively deliver is actually by writing the fastest, shittiest code you can.
I’m not so sure about production code though.
The Empty Box | CSS-Tricks
This is an excellent framing for minimal viable products—what would the black box theatre production be?
Forget about all the production and complexity you could build. What’s the purpose you want to convey at the core?
Global and Component Style Settings with CSS Variables — Sara Soueidan
Sara shares how she programmes with custom properties in CSS. It sounds like her sensible approach aligns quite nicely with Andy’s CUBE CSS methodology.
Oh, and she’s using Fractal to organise her components:
I’ve been using Fractal for a couple of years now. I chose it over other pattern library tools because it fit my needs perfectly — I wanted a tool that was unopinionated and flexible enough to allow me to set up and structure my project the way I wanted to. Fractal fit the description perfectly because it is agnostic as to the way I develop or the tools I use.
How big tech hijacked its sharpest, funniest critics - MIT Technology Review
How design fiction was co-opted. A piece by Tim Maughan with soundbites from Julian Bleecker, Anab Jain, and Scott Smith.
Demos, Prototypes, and MVPs | Jacob Kaplan-Moss
I’m usually building one of three things: a demo, a prototype, or a minimum viable product (MVP).
I’ve seen some confusion over these terms — some people seem to use them somewhat interchangeable. But they’re not the same thing, and building one when you need another can cause problems.
This is a very useful distinction!
On Design Fiction: Close, But No Cigar - Near Future Laboratory
If you end up with a draft of a short story or a few paragraphs of a typical UX interaction scenario, or a storyboard, or a little film of someone swiping on a screen to show how your App idea would work — you have not done Design Fiction.
What you’ve done is write a short story, which can only possibly be read as a short story.
What you should ideally produce is something a casual observer may mistake for a contemporary artefact, but which only reveals itself as a fiction on closer inspection. It should be very much “as if..” this thing really existed. It should feel real, normal, not some fantasy.
Notes on prototyping – Ben Frain
Good tips on prototyping using the very materials that the final product will be built in—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
The only thing I would add is that, in my experience, it’s vital that the prototype does not morph into the final product …no matter how tempting it sometimes seems.
Prototypes are made to be discarded (having validated or invalidated an idea). Making a prototype and making something for production require very different mindsets: with prototyping it’s all about speed of creation; with production work, it’s all about quality of execution.
Saving Your Web Workflows with Prototyping · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
A well-written (and beautifully designed) article on the nature of the web, and what that means for those of us who build upon it. Matthias builds on the idea of material honestly and concludes that designing through prototypes—rather than making pictures of websites—results in a truer product.
A prototyping mindset means cultivating transparency and showing your work early to your team, to users – and to clients as well, which can spark excited conversations. A prototyping mindset also means valuing learning over fast results. And it means involving everyone from the beginning and closely working together as a team to dissolve the separation of linear workflows.
Painting with Code : Airbnb Design
Very clever stuff here from Jon in the tradition of Bret Victor—alter Sketch files by directly manipulating code (React, in this case).
I’m not sure the particular use-case outlined here is going to apply much outside of AirBnB (just because the direction of code-to-Sketch feels inverted from most processes) but the underlying idea of treating visual design assets and code as two manifestations of the same process …that’s very powerful.
microicon
These icons-as-a-service could be really useful for making quick’n’dirty HTML prototypes.
What design sprints are good for — Cennydd Bowles
Cennydd enumerates what design sprints are good for:
- generating momentum,
- highlighting the scope of the design process,
- developing the team, or
- provoking core product issues.
And also what they’re not so good for:
- reliable product design,
- proposing sophisticated user research,
- answering deep product-market fit questions, or
- getting the green light.
How to prototype in the browser | GDS design notes
This is a clever quick’n’dirty way of prototyping iterations on an existing site using dev tools and screenshots.