Effective Prototyping

What Should You Prototype?

Regardless of whether you create paper or digital prototypes, you will need to know what to prototype. By this time, you may realize that you should be prototyping the same set of transactions that we suggested you flow and wireframe. Prototype tasks that are:

  • Frequently used, like the main task in your product and other important transactions.
  • Critical. Remember the bomb icon in Delta’s call center system? Few agents ever needed to use it, but they had to know it was there. 
  • Unusual. An interaction that uses an unfamiliar icon or another in which the user needs to use, compare, or evaluate two or more dissimilar pieces of data.
  • Important to your client or stakeholder.


You may NOT need to prototype your login or signup flow, your ‘Profile’ screens, and perhaps not even your search results screen – although if it returns multi-line or wordy results you probably should prototype it.

You certainly WILL want to prototype something where people swipe, flick, or use other gestures. Those that rely on an animation. You’ll want to prototype your shopping funnel to see that people fully understand how to the buy something. Also, any transaction that uses bulky information, that filters items, moves items around or requires people to match, evaluate, or compare two different types of things. You’ll also want to prototype multi-step transactions, or ‘wizards,’ such as a signup, delivery and checkout process that spans several screens.

Effective Prototyping Tips:

  • Don’t prototype interactions that are beyond the prototyping tool’s capabilities. For instance, no current method exists to create a ‘pinch to zoom’ effect in Figma and similar tools, although a product called Framer may be able to handle this. But no UX interviewer will hold that against you.  
  • Avoid dummy text. Dummy text like lorem ipsum should be avoided in early stages of digital prototyping. Use real content to understand how it affects the overall design.
  • Base your prototypes on User Flows and real scenarios.
  • Prototype only what you need. You don’t need to make every interactive object functional. As we’ll see, you don’t even need to make every instance of an object functional.

Read this short Forbes article on prototyping best practices