Putting the ink into design thinking | Clearleft

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.

The Demo → Demo Loop - daverupert.com

I’m 100% convinced that working demo-to-demo is the secret formula to making successful creative products.

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.

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.