Why ugly prototypes are important
By: Monica Arriaga
Tags: Design Thinking, Design Process, Design, UI, Prototyping

Why ugly prototypes are important

Photo by Jeff Frenette on Unsplash

Every junior designer, whether in the UX field or with an industrial design background, drools over jaw-dropping snapshots of their creations. We spend countless hours waiting for our poor computers to render perfect images able to seduce anyone. You might be familiar with high contrast pictures, smooth fillets, and slow-motion videos that precede the launch of a new product. Design, after all, is supposed to make things look awesome, right?

I’m sorry to tell you that eye-candy images will not always do the trick.

The thing about always aiming for “beautiful” design is that it may obstruct a designer from doing actually good design. Once you have run enough participatory workshops, you eventually learn that some people might even feel intimidated by pretty pictures, blocking collaboration altogether.

I remember a project in which the goal was to understand how to solve major urban planning issues in a marginalized area. We were having a focus group session with people living in that community and besides answering a few questions, participants would have to interact with a prototype of our design to understand if the solution being proposed addressed the problem. My task was to build this prototype and then design activities around it.

My prototype was awesome. I was proud, I felt that all the hours spent on the school workshop sanding away styrofoam had been worth it. I was officially a great designer. Then, disaster struck.

After the questions session, we could not interact with the users or aid them in any way. We just had to sit back, observe, and write a report about what we saw.

Nobody interacted with it, participants just stood there confused, arguing whether they should touch it or not. There was nothing to observe, there were no insights to analyze later on. We weren’t able to collect the information we needed for the project and I had to do it all over again. But how? All the design skills were there!

What happened is that the prototype was so pretty and perfect, that nobody wanted to touch it.

See where things went wrong? My designer ego was happy, but my vision to understand the purpose of the project was blocked, only to end up with a pile of extra work.

Why are you prototyping for, anyway?

The purpose of design as a discipline is a pandora box, a debate I do not intend to start now. However, I must tell you that the importance of design has gained traction in the past decades and fortunately, –or unfortunately, however you may see it– designers are now key players in some of the most challenging problems of our time.

Design is a relatively new discipline, and the direction that design has taken towards solving bigger issues has also happened in an accelerated way, so in a way, we are still catching up on the new skillset that the world expects from us as designers, like let's say, developing a systems thinking mindset. Of course, we still need the design practices that were crucial in the 1920s, like let’s say, sketching and prototyping. The thing is that, back in the dawn of modernity, the value of bringing designers and artists into manufacturing plants and workshops for prototyping was that they understood new manufacturing processes and, with their creativity, be able to articulate new possibilities, whether or not they were beautiful. Consider how designers are now part of software development and business departments. What is the real value of us being at that table?

As important it is to develop an understanding of color theory, composition, and overall good aesthetics development, the role of the designer nowadays includes building ideas that collaboratively address serious issues with people who do not necessarily have a design background. Some of the new areas of expertise added to the design realm include working with the public sector, NGOs, entrepreneurs, so on and so forth.

I am not saying that this is always the intended purpose. Some prototypes have the specific function of carrying out tests of performance, some others specifically intend to show aesthetic features or to measure perceptions, and by all means, must be “beautiful”. What worries me is the lack of empathy in how designers apply design thinking within organizations and the emphasis that design schools still put on aesthetics. We must bear in mind the purpose of why we are doing what we are doing, and for designers that means that beautiful renders might not be enough.

We are starting to realize that inviting everyone into the design process, no matter the background or social situation, is a great way to build better solutions for the future.