The benefits of interactive prototypes for UX showcases
The next time you have a showcase, use an interactive prototype and leave your audience in awe
Showcases are a fundamental part of the lifecycle of a product, or at least personally, I think they are. Sharing to a wider audience outside my team the progress of my projects and involving everyone in a discussion can be very beneficial and bring up ideas and feedback no one part of the project was able to have.
Despite the usefulness of showcases, there are challenges to face when showing designs to a non-designer audience. Designers can see things happening in their minds, we are visual animals and the superpower to imagine real-life scenarios even just by staring at a static design.
However, product owners, business analysts, developers and so on generally don’t have the same ability being their jobs are completely different. This means that showcasing a static design, a product that they can’t touch and feel, results challenging to understand. Because of that, we increase the risk of creating confusion, not selling our designs the way they deserve and risk to shift the conversation away from the main topic.
If this wasn’t enough, I have seen designers unfairly failing at delivering successful showcases simply because they lacked strong presentation skills and struggled to explain the main points and qualities of their work. What if they had on their side a better tool than a Sketch document or a Zeplin project?
Introducing interactive prototypes
Not long ago I was working on a new concept for a collapsible header for an app I was working on. No one in the entire company thought of such a solution in order to improve the experience on the busiest screen of the app, probably because of the nature of the product being stuck in its old fashioned ways.
When I took my idea to the rest of the designer everyone easily understood the power of it right away. Then the moment of showcasing my idea came along and the norm would have been for me to show a Zeplin project with my three artboards showing the various statuses of the header: fully expanded, collapsing and collapsed. I knew that my concept was out of the box for that environment, so I had to make sure to have a strong and powerful showcase.
Two weeks into a new role and I walked into my first showcase with an innovative idea which could have potentially changed a lot of what had been done before I started. I had to make sure everyone saw what I was seeing in my head, not just through static images. That’s when I opened Principle and made a working prototype of the header experience. I loaded my prototype on a few testing devices and went into showcasing my first project at the new gig.
I didn’t present any of the UI from my Sketch, I limited myself to show only the current experience, how it worked and its challenges. I then asked to use the devices with the preloaded prototypes while I explained my concept. The result was amazing. Being able to play with a realistic version of my design showed everyone how beneficial it would have been to implement a collapsible header. From product owners to developers everyone was pretty excited about introducing this new feature, no one went off topic and the discussion was focussed on the concept I presented.
Showcasing a working prototype broke the barrier between ideas and real life, allowing non-creative to see through a designer’s eyes. Despite the complexity of the design I was presenting, everyone in the audience understood in the blink of an eye what I was trying to achieve because they managed to live a first person real life scenario. Everyone loved my concept and the discussion sprung from my showcase was very productive. We managed to avoid any out of topic questions and focus on what would be the next steps for research to validate the usability of the header and what impact it would have had on development.
This is one of the many occasions where an interactive prototype helped me in creating that Aha! moment with my audience during a showcase.
Conclusion
Processing static visual information into concepts and flows is not an easy task for non-creative minds. As designers, we have many tools we can use to fill the gap between business and creatives to reach a better final result with less hassle and more focussed conversations. Interactive prototypes not only help us better showcasing a concept but also creates excitement in our stakeholders as they can personally experience an idea and live it before it becomes reality.
