Journal tags: prototyping

The latest episode of the Clearleft podcast is live and it’s all about prototyping.

There’s a bit of a narrative thread in there about airplanes, kicked off by a great story Benjamin tells about testing a physical prototype …of the inside of a transatlantic airliner. Lorenzo recounts his story of mocking up a fake CMS with readily-available tools. And Trys tells of a progressive web app he whipped up for our friends at Suffolk Libraries. There’s even a bit about Hack Farm in there too.

But just to make sure it isn’t too much of a Clearleft love-in, I also interviewed an outside expert: Adekunle Oduye. It was very kind of him to give up his time, especially considering he had just moved house …in a pandemic!

There are some great words of wisdom, immortalised in the transcript:

Prototypical code isn’t production code. It’s quick and it’s often a little bit dirty and it’s not really fit for purpose in that final deliverable. But it’s also there to be inspiring and to gather a team and show that something is possible.

—Trys

If you’re building something and you’re not really sure if it’s a right solution, use the word prototype versus design, because I feel like when people say design, that’s like the end result.

—Adekunle

I always think of a prototype as a prop. It’s something to look at, something to prod. And ideally you’re trying to work out what works and what doesn’t.

— Benjamin

The whole episode is just over 21 minutes long. Have a listen and enjoy the stories.

If you like what you hear, please spread the word. Tell your Slack colleagues, your Twitter friends, your LinkedIn acquaintances. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can remedy that on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and anywhere that accepts RSS.

The unstoppable engine of An Event Apart in Seattle rolls onward. The second talk of the second day is from the indominatable Una Kravets. Her talk is called From Ideation to Iteration: Design Thinking for Work and for Life. Here’s the description:

Have you ever had a looming deadline and no idea where to start? Do you have a big task to face but are having trouble figuring out how to get there? Have you ever wanted to learn a technology, or build a side project but didn’t know what to build? In this talk, Una will go over an actionable approach and several techniques for applying design thinking to our work and every aspect of our lives. This includes ideating product features, blog post ideas, or even what general direction we want to move toward in our businesses. We’ll go over traditional approaches and breakout techniques that will leave you feeling more in control and ready to reach your goals.

Let’s see if I can keep up with this…

Una’s going to talk about design thinking. Una does a variety of different work outside her day job—a podcast, dev doodles, etc. Sometimes at work she’s given big, big tasks like “build a design system.” Her reaction is “whut?” How do you even start with a task like that.

Also, we make big goals sometimes. Who makes new year’s resolutions? But what does “get more fit” or “earn more income” even mean?

In this talk, Una will break things down and show how design thinking can be applied to anything.

Design thinking

A stategic, solution-based approach to solving problems.

It’s a process. It’s iterative. It’s used by IBM, Apple, GE, and it’s taught to students at a lot of different universities.

Tim Brown of Ideo points out that there’s a Venn diagram of feasability, desirability, and viability. In the middle is the point of innovation.

The steps are:

1. Empathise — develop a deep understanding of the challenge
2. Define — clearly articulate the problem.
3. Ideate — brainstorm potential solutions.
4. Prototype — design a protoype to
5. Test — and iterate.

Una feels that the feedback part is potentially missing there. IBM uses a loop diagram to include feedback. Ideo uses these steps:

1. Frame a question
2. Gather inspiration
3. Generate ideas
4. Make ideas tangible
5. Test to learn
6. Share the story

Another way to think about this is how the teams interact. There’s divergence and convergence throughout. Then there’s the double diamond: design, deliver, discover.

Ideo wrote a book called Design Thinking for Libraries. It has some useful tools and diagrams. Una found this fascinating because it wasn’t specifically about products. In healthcare, GE Health used design thinking for their Adventure Series MRI scanners—it resulted in 80% less need to use sedatives. The solution might seem obvious to us in hindsight, but it wouldn’t have been obvious to medical professionals in their everyday busy lives.

Design thinking is bullshit, says Natasha Jen. She describes how it’s become an over-used term that has lost its value. Una can relate—she gets annoyed when there’s too much talking and not enough doing. Design thinking is not diagrams and sticky notes. It’s a process. It’s very much about doing something to shift perspective. It’s another tool in our toolkit, even if it has become an overused term like “synergy.”

Back in 2014, when Una was working at IBM, she thought design thinking was stupid. It seemed to be all talk, talk, talk. It felt tedious. It was 75% talking and 25% development. The balance wasn’t right.

But it’s also true that solutioning too early leads to cruft. If you end up going back to the drawing board, maybe the time could’ve been better spent doing some design thinking up front. Focus on the problem, not the solution.

Now some developers might be thinking that this is outside their area. But it can really help you in your career. It can help you choose technologies. Also, everyone on the team, regardless of role, is responsible for the product.

1. Empathise

Understand your users and the challenge. This could be a task that a user is trying to accomplish, or it could be you trying to get a raise.

Sometimes we forget who our user is. The techniques in this first step helps us solve their needs, not our needs.

You might have many users that you’re trying to help, but try focusing in on a few. You can create personas. When Una was working at Digital Ocean, the users were developers. The personas reflected this. Do the research to get to know your users.

Next, you can create an empathy map for your users. What are their goals? What are their hopes? What will they gain from your product?

Connect the empathy map to a specific context—a goal and or a scenario that the user is going through.

Bear in mind that there are many layers to your user. There are conscious rational thoughts, but also subconscious emotional thoughts. Empathy mapping helps you understand how to best communicate with your user.

Una shares a real-life scenario of hers: create a new shop-able product that increases time on site. That’s a pretty big goal. She creates a persona for a college-educated woman working in the medical field who commutes on the subway, keeps a skin-caring routing, and is getting into cake-making. Next, Una creates an empathy map for this persona. What she says, thinks, feels, and does. All of this is within the context of browsing your fashion media website casually at work.

2: Define

The problem statement should be:

• Human-centred,
• Specific, but not too technical (don’t solutionise too soon),
• Narrow in scope.

How can we best create a product-highlighting web experience that Rosalyn will enjoy to increase her time on site?

You can use a tool with two columns: As-Is and to-Be. The first column is what users currently do. The second column is what you want to achieve.

3. Ideate

This is the fun part. Good old-fashioned brainstorming is good here. Go for quantity here. Get loads of ideas out.

There’s also a “worst possible ideas” game you can play at this stage. It can be a good ice-breaker.

Have a second round of brainstorming where you play the “yes, and…” game to build on the first round.

When Una was working on The Zoe Report, she found that moodboards were really useful. The iteration cycle was very fast. A moodboard allowed them to skip a lot of the back and forth between design and development. They built the website without any visual design mock-ups. They prototyped quickly, tested quickly, and shipped quickly.

Journey-mapping is the next tool you can use in this ideation phase. Map out the steps between the start and end of a user journey. Keep it simple. This is a great time to refine your product and reduce complexity.

Next, start sketching out ideas. Again, this is a great time to uncover issues and solve problems before things get too defined. But remember, when you’re showcasing your ideas in sketches, too many ideas can lead to analyis paralysis.

Oh dear. Jam. Jam. Jam. Jam. Jam. Yes, Una is using the paradox-of-choice jam example …the study who’s findings could not be reproduced.

4. Prototype

Go forth and build. A prototype can exist on a number of different axes:

• Representation—the form it takes.
• Precision—the detail it contains.
• Interactivity—the extent a user can interact with it.
• Evolution—the life stage it is at.

There are lot of prototyping tools out there. Prototypr.io helps you find the right tool for you. It breaks things down by fidelity and life cycle.

But not all prototyping has to be digital. Paper prototyping only needs pen, paper, and scissors. Some tips:

• Use a transparency sheet for forms.
• Use well-visible and mid-tip pens.
• Draw up your prototype in black and white—people can get caught up in colour.

But on the web, Una recommends getting to digital as quickly as possible because interaction is such a big part of the experience. That’s why Una likes to prototype in code. But this is still a rapid prototyping phase so don’t get too caught up in the details.

5. Test

Testing with internal teams is fine during the ideation phase, but to understand how users will relate to your product, you need to test with representative people. We are not our users.

As well as the user, have a facilitator, a computer, and a scriber. As a facilitator, it’s a good idea to reduce the amount of input you give a user. Don’t hand-hold too much or you will give away your pre-existing knowledge. Encourage your user to be verbal.

Sessioncam is a tool for creating a heatmap of where people are interacting. There are also tools for tracking clicks or mouse hovers. These all feel so utterly icky to me.

The metrics you might be looking to gather could be click-through rate, time-on-site, etc. But, Una cautions, be very wary of adding all these third-party scripts to your site and slowing it down. Who’s testing the A/B tests?

On Bustle, Una wanted to measure interactions on mobile. They tested different UI elements for interactions. They ended up updating the product with a horizontal swiping component. They were able to improve the product and ship a more refined experience.

6. Review and iterate

Una feels that this step is the most important. Analyse your successes and failures, and plan to improve.

Technology changes over time so what’s feasible and viable also changes.

Design thinking on the daily

You can use design thinking in your everyday life. Maybe you want to learn JavaScript, or write blog posts, or get more fit. Una used design thinking brainstorming to break down her goals, categorise and organise them.

“Get better at JavaScript” is a goal that Una has every year.

Empathise. In this situation, the user is you. You can still create a persona of yourself. Define. Why do you want to get better at JavaScript? Is it about making better use of your time? Ideate. There are so many different ways to learn. There are books and video courses. Or you could have a project to focus on. Break. It. Down! Create actionable steps and define how you will measure progress. Match the list of things you want to learn with the list of possible side projects. Prototype. Don’t take it literally. Just build something. Test. You’re testing on yourself in this case. Review. Una does an annual review. It’s a nice therapeutic exercise and helps her move forward into the next year with actionable goals.

Another goal might be “Write a blog post.”

Empathise. Your users are your potential readers. Who do you have in mind? Make personas. Define. What’s the topic? Ideate. If you don’t know what to write about, brainstorm. What are you working on at work that you’re learning from? Select one to try. Prototype. Write. Test. Maybe show it to co-workers. Review. How did it go? Good? Bad? Refine your process for the next blog post.

Here’s a goal: “Buy a gift for someone.”

Empathise. What does this person like? What have they enjoyed receiving in the past? Define. Is the gift something they’ll enjoy for a long time? Something they can share? Ideate. Bounce ideas off friends and relatives. Prototype. In this case, this means getting the gift. Review. Did they like it?

“Get Fit.”

In this case, the review part is probably the most important part.

Marie Kondo asks “Does this spark joy?” Ask the same question of your goals.

Remember, design thinking is not just about talking, and sticky notes. It’s about getting in the right headspace for your users.

Design thinking matters—because everything we do, we do for people. Having the tools to see through the lens of those people will help you be a more well-rounded person.

Our hack week at CERN to reproduce the WorldWideWeb browser was five days long. That’s also the length of a design sprint. So …was what we did a design sprint?

I’m going to say no.

On the surface, our project has all the hallmarks of a design sprint. A group of people who don’t normally work together were thrown into an instense week of problem-solving and building, culminating in a tangible testable output. But when you look closer, the journey itself was quite different. A design sprint is typical broken into five phases, each one mapped on to a day of work:

1. Understand and Map
2. Demos and Sketch
3. Decide and Storyboard
4. Prototype
5. Test

There was certainly plenty of understanding, sketching, and prototyping involved in our hack week at CERN, but we knew going in what the output would be at the end of the week. That’s not the case with most design sprints: figuring out what you’re going to make is half the work. In our case, we knew what needed to be produced; we just had to figure out how. Our process looked more like this:

1. Understand and Map
2. Research and Sketch
3. Build
4. Build
5. Build

Now you could say that it’s a kind of design sprint, but I think there’s value in reserving the term “design sprint” for the specific five-day process. As it is, there’s enough confusion between the term “sprint” in its agile sense and “design sprint”.

When we do front-end development at Clearleft, we’re usually delivering production code, often in the form of a component library. That means our priorities are performance, accessibility, robustness, and other markers of quality when it comes to web development.

But every so often, we use the materials of front-end development—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—to produce something that isn’t intended for production. I’m talking about prototyping.

There are plenty of non-code prototyping tools out there, and our designers often reach for them to communicate subtleties like motion design. But when it comes to testing a prototype with real users, it’s hard to beat the flexibility of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Load it up in a browser and away you go.

We do a lot of design sprints, where time is of the essence. The prototype we produce on the penultimate day of the sprint definitely won’t be production quality, but it will be good enough to test.

What’s interesting is that—when it comes to prototyping—our usual front-end priorities can and should go out the window. The priority now is speed. If that means sacrificing semantics or performance, then so be it. If I’m building a prototype and I find myself thinking “now, what’s the right class name for this component?”, then I know I’m in the wrong mindset. That question might be valid for production code, but it’s a waste of time for prototypes.

So these two kinds of work require very different attitudes. For production work, quality is key. For prototyping, making something quickly is what matters.

Whereas I would think long and hard about the performance impacts of third-party libraries and frameworks on a public project, I won’t give it a second thought when it comes to a prototype. Throw all the JavaScript frameworks and CSS libraries you want at it (although I would argue that in-browser technologies like CSS Grid have made CSS libraries like Bootstrap less necessary, even for prototyping).

Alternating between production projects and prototyping projects can be quite fun, if a little disorienting. It’s almost like I have to flip a switch in my brain to change tracks.

When a prototype is successful, works great, and tests well, there’s a real temptation to use the prototype code as the basis for the final product. Don’t do this! I’ve made that mistake in the past and it always ends badly. I ended up spending far more time trying to wrangle prototype code to a production level than if I had just started from a clean slate.

Build prototypes to test ideas, designs, interactions, and interfaces …and then throw the code away. The value of a prototype is in answering questions and testing hypotheses. Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy when it’s time to switch over into production mode.

Of course it should go without saying that you should never, ever release prototype code into production.

And yet…

More and more live sites seem to be built with a prototyping mindset. Weighty JavaScript frameworks are used regardless of appropriateness. Accessibility, if it’s even considered at all, is relegated to an afterthought. Fragile architectures are employed that rely on first loading and then executing JavaScript in order to render basic content. Developer experience is prioritised over user experience.

Heydon recently highlighted an article that offered this tip for aspiring web developers:

As for HTML, there’s not much to learn right away and you can kind of learn as you go, but before making your first templates, know the difference between in-line elements like span and how they differ from block ones like div.

That’s perfectly reasonable advice …if you’re building a prototype. But if you’re building something for public consumption, you have a duty of care to the end users.

Time for even more CSS goodness at An Event Apart Seattle (Special Edition). Eric’s talk is called Fit For Purpose: Making Sense of the New CSS. Here are my notes…

Eric isn’t going to dive quite as deeply as Rachel, but he is going to share some patterns he has used.

Feature queries

First up: feature queries! Or @supports, if you prefer. You can ask a browser “do you support this feature?” If you haven’t used feature queries, you might be wondering why you have to say the property and the value. Well, think about it. If you asked a browser “do you support display?”, it’s not very useful. So you have to say “do you support display: grid?”

Here’s a nice pattern from Lea Verou for detecting support for custom properties:

@supports (--css: variables)

Here’s a gotcha:

@supports (clip-path: polygon())

That won’t work because polygon() is invalid. This will work:

@supports (clip-path: polygon(0 0))

So to use feature queries, you need to understand valid values for properties.

You can chain feature queries together, or just pick the least-supported thing you’re testing for and test just for that.

Here’s a pattern Eric used when he only wanted to make text sideways, but only if grid is supported:

@supports (display: grid) {
    ...
    @supports (writing-mode: sideways-lr) {
        ...
    }
}

That’s functionally equivalent to:

@supports (display: grid) {
    ...
}
@supports (display:grid) and (writing-mode: sideways-lr) {
    ...
}

Choose whichever pattern makes sense to you. More to the point, choose the pattern that makes sense to your future self when you revisit your code.

Feature queries need to work together with media queries. Sometimes there are effects that you only want to apply on larger viewports. Do you put your feature queries inside your media queries? Or do you put your media queries inside your feature queries?

• MOSS: Media Outside Support Statements
• MISO: Media Inside Supports Object

Use MOSS when you have more media switches than support blocks. Use MISO when you only have a few breakpoints but lots of feature queries.

That’s one idea that Eric has. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.

And remember, CSS is still CSS. Sometimes you don’t need a feature query at all. You could just use hanging-punctuation without testing for it. Browsers that don’t understand it will just ignore it. CSS has implicit feature queries built in. You don’t have to put your grid layout in a feature query, but you might want to put grid-specific margins and widths inside a feature query for display: grid.

Feature queries really help us get from now to the future.

Flexbox

Let’s move on to flexbox. Flexbox is great for things in a line.

On the An Event Apart site, the profile pictures have social media icons lined up at the bottom. Sometimes there are just a few. Sometimes there are a lot more. This is using flexbox. Why? Because it’s cool. Also, because it’s flexbox, you can create rules about how the icons should behave if one of the icons is taller than the others. (It’s gotten to the point that Eric has forgotten that vertically-centring things in CSS is supposed to be hard. The jokes aren’t funny any more.) Also, what if there’s no photo? Using flexbox, you can say “if there’s no photo, change the direction of the icons to be vertical.” Once again, it’s all about writing less CSS.

Also, note that the profile picture is being floated. That’s the right tool for the job. It feels almost transgressive to use float for exactly the purpose for which it was intended.

On the An Event Apart site, the header is currently using absolute positioning to pull the navigation from the bottom of the page source to the top of the viewport. But now you get overlap at some screen sizes. Flexbox would make it much more robust. (Eric uses the flexbox inspector in Firefox Nightly to demonstrate.)

With flexbox, what works horizontally works vertically. Flexbox allows you to align things, as long as you’re aligning in one direction. Flexbox makes things springy. Everything’s related and pushing against each other in a way that makes sense for this medium. It’s intuitive, even though it takes a bit of getting used to …because we’ve picked up some bad habits. To quote Yoda, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” A lot of the barrier is getting over what we’ve internalised. Eric envies the people starting out now. They get to start fresh. It’s like when people who never had to table layouts see code from that time period: it (quite rightly) doesn’t make any sense. That’s what it’s going to be like when people starting out today see the float-based layouts from Bootstrap and the like.

Grid

That’s going to happen with grid too. We must unlearn what we have learned from twenty years of floats and positioning. What makes it worth is:

1. Flexbox and grid are pretty easy to get used to, and
2. It’s amazing what you can do!

Eric quotes from an article called How We adopted CSS Grid at Scale:

…we agreed to use CSS Grid at the layout level and Flexbox at the component level (arranging child items of components). Although there’s some overlap and in some cases both could be used interchangeably, abiding by this rule helped us avoid any confusion in gray areas.

Don’t be afraid to set these kind of arbitrary limits that aren’t technological, but are necessary for the team to work well together.

Eric hacked his Wordpress admin interface to use grid instead of floats for an activity component (a list of dates and titles). He initially turned each list item into a separate grid. The overall list didn’t look right. What Eric really needed was a subgrid capability, so that the mini grids (the list items) would relate to one another within the larger grid (the list). But subgrid doesn’t exist yet.

In this case, there’s a way to fake it using display: contents. Eric made the list a grid and used display: contents on the list items. It’s as though you’re saying that the contents of the li are really the contents of the ul. That works in this particular case.

The feature queries for that looked like:

@supports (display: grid) {
    ...
    @supports (display: contents) {
        ...
    }
}

Eric is also using the grid “ASCII art” (named areas) technique on his personal site. This works independent of source order. For that reason, make sure your source order makes sense.

Using media queries, Eric defines entirely different layouts simply by using different ASCII art. He’s switching templates.

For a proposed redesign of the An Event Apart site, Eric used CSS grid as a prototyping tool. He took a PDF, sliced it up, exported JPGs, and then used grid to lay out those images in a flexible grid. Rapid prototyping! The Firefox grid inspector really helps here. In less than an hour, he had a working layout. He could test whether the layout was sensible and robust. Then he swapped out the sliced images for real content. That took maybe another hour (mostly because it was faster to re-type the text than try to copy and paste from a PDF). CSS makes it that damn easy now!

So even if you’re not going to put things like grid into production, they can still be enormously useful as design tools (and you’re getting to grips with this new stuff).

See also:

• Torre’s notes from this talk.