What to ask your agency about prototyping

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on prototyping, these questions are worth asking early.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

A clickable prototype surfaces confusion no static mockup will. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Test with five people and you will find most of the problems. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

How to tell if yours is fine

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Three things worth confirming about prototyping before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Prototypes are for learning, not for reuse as production code — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.