- As a designer, one of the most frustrating moments,
is when a great idea fails to make it to market,
because someone inside the company
didn't understand why the idea is valuable to the user,
to the company, or to themselves.
Traditional forms of design documentation
like static wireframes and visual design comps,
or binders holding a style guide
or design language system tend to be
hard to grasp emotionally,
and it's easy for stakeholders to miss the key ideas.
On the other hand, a prototype,
such as a mobile phone simulation,
which you, your team, and your stakeholders
can actually interact with,
is an excellent way to communicate
both the functional flow of your solution,
as well as its emotional and sensory impact.
So it might be time to try a prototype
if your documents are suffering
from any of these three problems.
They fail to effectively communicate your design intent,
it's not flexible enough to evolve with incremental changes,
or it's only able to provide a path to
the ideal and long-term result.
Whether your a design consultancy
or an internal design team,
you've probably seen this unsuccessfully
impact the organization.
There tend to be three likely reasons for that.
The design documents were unable to simulate the emotion
and nuance that's vital to the experience,
or perhaps keep up with the current design thinking,
or align with the development realities and timeline.
So use prototypes as the cornerstone
of your design documents.
Let them do the talking and you'll have to write
even less documentation.
But don't leave traditional design docs out entirely.
They're fantastic for providing extra context,
and in this form, they're much more likely to be read.
Let's take a look at what we mean here.
General Electric was working to standardize
their software experiences,
and to provide support and resources for designers.
So we developed a broad UX framework for GE to share
knowledge, resources, and best practices.
Using this framework, we created a Web Toolkit
that demonstrated the design language system.
This digital kit of parts made complex system's
simpler to design and use,
and GE's timed market significantly decreased,
while improving the experience of applications
acrossed healthcare, energy, and infrastructure.
So let's try this out.
At the start of your next project,
pause before you begin designing,
and write your goals for the project on Post-it notes,
or on a Whiteboard.
Make sure you do this with the design team.
Discuss how the team will document
and share the progress internally
and with your stakeholders.
Identify which parts could use a prototype.
This might become a statement like,
"A prototype that illustrates a new way
"for people to find great restaurants."
Or, "Experiment with several ways to search
"for a university by prototyping."
As a team, write each of these statements on a Post-it,
and group them with the main design goal
that they hope to illustrate.
And then from there identify the goals
that would require a traditional design deliverables,
to either help create prototypes,
or to discover the best design solutions.
You'll likely find, that you need very few
traditional deliverables,
because the prototypes are able to convey
so many aspects of the design.
So together, prototypes and static design docs
provide a highly accurate portrayal of the design intent,
using layers of communication
that will engage a much broader audience.