Design artifacts such as sketches, wireframes, visual mockups, and prototypes are the essence of what interaction designers use to communicate their work. However, not all deliverables have equal scope. Instead, each deliverable type mentioned covers an area of the design space that is smaller or larger as they represent less or more screens.

From my personal experience I find that sketches (or wireframes) afford the designer to cover the widest possible scope. Sketches can be used to draw up or think through the widest possible design space. Sooner or later more detail is required beyond sketches as one steps into the world of visual design. Here the discussion takes on pixel level details, styles, branding elements, colours and fonts. At this level of detail, however the number of screens that are represented diminish relatively to that of sketches. Only a few selected screen types need to be explored as mockups. Finally, the scope that prototypes cover I find are the smallest. Most of my prototypes test the interactivity or behaviour for a particular page. These are often the closest in detail to the real thing as they often exist in HTML, Javascript form, and live in the browser.

What’s more interesting is that once the scope is broken up and varied across these various types of deliverables, they can begin working together in a hierarchy to serve different goals. Sketches are used to explore the breadth and flow of the interface as they unify the largest numbers of screens with user scenarios or stories. Visual design mockups are used to test the visual style details for a couple of page types. Finally, prototypes are used to test experimental page level interactions and convey the feeling of rich interactivity to get stakeholders excited about a particular concept. Taken together, each deliverable only needs a uniquely defined scope to fulfil its purpose.

Inspired by evolutionary thoughts, variation is one idea that helps to achieve the most optimally fit forms during a design process. All the things we design, be it web sites, toothbrushes or orange squeezers, eventually leave the artificial boundaries of the studio and get in contact with a real environment to stand the test of time. One could argue that the more variety of ideas we have, the higher the chance that the form and context will be properly fit and adapted to each other. On this note, I wonder if we have enough variation in the artifacts we design, or perhaps could we strive for even more? Comparing a design process to what happens in nature, each individual living thing is slightly different. Each person is a little bit taller, has a slightly different face, etc, etc. But if we look more closely on the products we design, variation seems to be tighter and more artificially controlled. If we open up a delivery truck filled with well designed toothbrushes, we can probably identify a thousand individual objects that look exactly the same (something that is less visible in nature). In nature we have form variation within a population (between each individual object), whereas in a design studio we have variation in a more phased approach between each cycle or iteration.

Perhaps what I’m really wondering is if there is room in a design process to inject more variation to all instances of a product. What if each user was exposed to a slightly different product and the best forms trickled up automatically like in evolutionary biology? What if a web site, each time a user visited it, appeared slightly different. Perhaps this is too difficult (costly?) with real physical products which under the forces of industrialization have undergone a shift from highly variant art and craft products toward more standardized forms. In the virtual world of bits and bytes however, the cost of bringing back variety should be theoretically lower.

This is not to say that there already aren’t variation causing process. The popularity of sketching in design already is an approach which thrives on the multitude of ideas. Design studios also make use of A/B Testing, which is another sign that people are seeing the value of taking variety and experimentation into the real world. Nonetheless, this all makes me wonder what an automated method for A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/.. testing would look like where every item produced is unique and thus more open to the laws of adaptation and survival of the fittest.

Sustainability, or the idea of zero waste and reuse of things created (concepts & code), also applies to the world of user interface prototyping. On one hand, there might be a push to build prototypes of such quality that the code that they rest on could be reused further in the development process. This so called “sustainability across a process” is just one approach of how UI waste can be reduced. Another way of building sustainable prototypes is by reusing elements from project to project. So if on one project a widget was used in a prototype, and then the same code is used on another project, it would be a sustainable act as well. This I’ll call “sustainability across projects”.

The truth is that at times there is more value of building “throw away” prototypes that are not of production ready quality. Building something quickly without regard for code quality, learning a lot from it, and then correcting the design direction could be more fruitful than building “high quality” prototypes whose code makes it into the future. However, in order to support sustainable or reusable prototype elements across projects, of course we need the right tools and setup. The idea of relying on emergent patterns is a sustainable across projects concept which EightShapes has been supporting with their unify framework, but also something I potentially want to implement for fluidia.