The Uncanny UX Valley

When to skip the wireframes and do it live

Users do not give genuine feedback unless they believe what they’re experiencing is genuine. Even if the person giving feedback is a software designer themselves, the mindset for evaluating a wireframe is starkly different than if they were evaluating the real thing.

How do I know this? Scope creep. I’m not talking about the things that were not spec’d out in the beginning of the project. I’m talking about changes in the things that were, especially when there’s no new information gleaned later on. Often times, after a clickable wireframe is approved, and a working prototype is presented, a flood of changes stream in that contradict what was originally agreed upon.

How could this happen? I don’t think the answer is “better wireframes” or a “more detailed” spec. People see the wireframe, they read the spec, but they don’t internalize how they will use the interface until it’s close to completion.

In human aesthetics, there is a idea called the uncanny valley:

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of human aesthetics which holds that when human features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some human observers.

In UX design there exists an uncanny valley, and I suggest it is where we must put our focus. It is where the user will give you the most honest feedback, because they are suddenly compelled to “speak now or forever hold their peace.” We haven’t yet taken effectively taken advantage of this psychological hack.

The reason we sketch in the first place is because it is too expensive to prototype. Surely, a sketch is faster and easier to iterate on than HTML, CSS and Javascript? And, a wireframe in Omnigraffle is more expensive than sketching, but still faster than coding, right? I’d like to suggest that no, it may not be faster or more efficient, especially when it has gotten so much easier to prototype in code.

Obviously, the definition of “working prototype” is a bit ambiguous, but what’s important is that the user who’s testing it reasonably believes it is the real thing. It is only then that you will receive truly genuine feedback.