Three Main Pitfalls of User Interface Prototyping and How to Avoid Them

User interface prototyping is an indispensable stage of UI design. The advantages of interface prototyping are numerous, ranging from boosting creativity to fostering communication within the development team. However, every web developer has to be aware of the dangers that interface prototyping has and that can easily be avoided with a bit of caution.

Sometimes clients do not know what prototypes or wireframes are meant to be. They see wireframes and get disappointed by the lack of visual elements. This creates one of the most widespread traps for web developers. In order to impress the client, they embellish wireframes with graphical elements, which are distracting and frequently unneeded. A web developer must remember that user interface prototyping is the initial stage, which helps develop the concept and test its usability, therefore interface prototyping is first performed in low fidelity. Graphical design details are dangerous at this stage because clients tend to focus on them rather than the entire concept, which gets you stuck in this phase longer than intended. Carefully educating the client about the importance and intention of interface prototypes will help avoid such pitfalls.

The next pitfall is the logical outcome of the first one. Too much detail takes too much time; that is inevitable. The more time and effort is put into the UI prototype, the more attached and inflexible the web-developer becomes. Remember that user interface prototyping is often referred to as “rapid prototyping”, and that is for a reason. It is supposed to be rapid. Most of the time only a few pages of the whole website or application are prototyped – that is enough to test and confirm the concept. So you can easily avoid this pitfall, too: Once the basics are agreed on, move on to the next stage.

Another danger of user interface prototyping, particularly high fidelity prototyping, is that clients come to believe that what they see is the actual product that simply needs to be revised and completed, which makes them significantly underestimate the timeframe of the project. In reality what they see is a prototype, and the product is yet to be created from scratch. Prototypes only give an idea of what the product will be like, and in most cases, the code of the prototype cannot be reused. Be clear with your client about stages of the product development and time frame for each, what stage you are currently at, and what this stage will accomplish. Then it should be possible to avoid such misunderstandings easily.