What I learned about prototyping after four years at Disney

Photo by Park Troopers on Unsplash

In April 2015, I joined the Disney Parks creative team to design mobile experiences for the happiest place on Earth. I learned a lot from a diverse group of humble, creative, and smart people.

Here’s a brief list of learnings specifically about prototyping from my time contracting as an Interaction Designer from 2015 to August 2019.
(I won’t discuss Disney’s process nor projects. I kept it high-level, so each insight is useful for everybody, regardless of the industry you work on).

Insight 1: Prototyping helps fill in the blanks left by static designs.

• As an Interaction Designer, you need to find the ideal moment to bring prototyping to the design process.
• When exploring an app flow, always keep an eye for the gaps between different screens or sections.
• Ask yourself: How do you get from A to B? What is the transition between these two states? Which actions would hit a service call (loading states)?
• Use motion to explore and adjust how the animations look.
  Use prototyping to test and adjust how the interactions feel.

Insight 2: Prototyping helps define a goal and drive a team towards it.

• A prototype is worth a thousand meetings.
• Use prototyping to set aspirational goals. Pass your prototype around, let people use it. Set the mindset of “This is what we want to achieve.”
• Socialize the prototype, inspire the different teams involved in the product to drive their motivation to accomplish challenging goals.

Insight 3: Prototyping is designing a bridge between “what to do” and “how to do it.”

• As an Interaction Designer, you’re a Design Advocate to the Development team and a Developer Advocate to the Design team.
• You don’t need to have all the answers, but you need to help uncover and focus on the right questions.
• Understand that, although there are different teams, there are no “sides.” Help foster collaboration. Build the bridge between the conversations around what to do and how to do it.

Insight 4: Prototyping is a unique design challenge in which you combine imagination, creativity, and problem-solving skills.

• A prototyper’s mindset is an explorer’s mindset, a hacker’s mindset.
• Curiosity is a trait that drives growth in prototypers. Test many tools, test many apps, test many interactions. Applied curiosity strengthens your imagination.
• Most of the time, a problem or challenge has more than one solution.
• Don’t stop at one answer. Look at a problem from different angles, solve it again and again. You’ll end up training your creativity.
• Don’t be afraid of tackling challenges you’ve never faced before.
• Take ownership of a challenge, approach unknowns through “what ifs.” Develop your problem-solving skills.

Insight 5: Prototyping feels like being paid to learn something new.

• There’s something fun, and scary, in going to work every day to solve problems you know you don’t have the answers to yet.
• All the unknowns that challenge your problem-solving skills, whether you solve them or not, end up becoming learning lessons.
• Share what you learn.

Insight 6: Prototyping gives you a sneak peek to the future. Investing in it saves the project money.

• For product design, prototyping is the most valuable when it helps to uncover and react to potential problems in the experience.
• For development teams, prototyping is the most valuable when it helps to identify technical challenges in advance.
• For research teams, prototyping is the most valuable when it helps to bring user-testing sessions as close as possible to the real-product experience.
• For the business, prototyping is the most valuable when it helps the project save money.
• Identify all of this potential — advocate for prototyping. Make sure to communicate the value of investing in it.

Insight 7: Deep observation improves prototyping, and vice versa.

• Prototyping is an activity that makes you grow as a designer by continually challenging you.
• Creating a habit out of applied curiosity and problem-solving skills improves the precision of your observations.
• By being more precise on your observations and analysis, you get to grow as a prototyper.
• Process what you learn from your wins and defeats. Write things down.

Prototyping made me learn about much more than just prototyping. I got to improve my communication, storytelling, and problem-solving skills.

In time, this brought me the opportunity to lead special projects (the ones about blue-sky ideation and speculative futures were the absolute best). I’m currently leading a team of designers at Globant, focused on helping Product and Technology teams pitch new products, and explore future features through design prototypes and PoCs.

I intentionally left the discussion about design tools out of this list.

When I reflected on these four years at Disney, I was interested in distilling general advice related to Interaction Design and prototyping, and I realized that the most important observations I had were about mindsets and the value of exploration and curiosity. Tools, although important, just ended up being secondary.

With my wife, enjoying the Disney magic

I use Twitter to talk about design and prototyping tools. If you liked reading this post, follow me there as I continue to document findings and observations related to Interaction Design.