Prototyping

General Tool Usage Rates

We asked designers which tools they use throughout their design processes. The survey indicated that Miro is the most used tool among Dell designers with 79% of the survey responders using Miro, followed by Figma, Adobe XD, and Webflow.

Findings:

• Designers have tools that essentially do the same thing, like Teams, Skype, and Slack or Figma and Adobe XD.
• They also have separate tools for different stages in the design process, such as one for brainstorming sessions, and another for prototyping.
• Some teams solved this by trying to keep everything in one tool, for example, using Miro as a DnF repository as well as a prototyping tool, or creating slides and storing information in a separate page in Figma as well as using it for prototyping.

Insight: Designers like versatile tools to use throughout DnF, prototyping, testing, etc. in order to collaborate and keep all information in one place.

• Convenience: Designers do not need to constantly switch between different applications while working. Everything is stored in one application.
• Time: The more tools designers use, the more resources used on their computers, and this goes back to the pain point on time. While we were interviewing, a lot of designers were able to show their work to us, but many of them would say like “I’ll show you this if it ever loads,” or “this application is great, but just really slow.” The need to use too many or duplicate tools can create frustration when designers need to reboot their computer several times a day or constantly wait for things to load to do their work. 

Low, Medium, and High Fidelity

Findings: We identified general use cases for low, medium, and high fidelity prototypes:

• Low: creating general layouts and iterate quickly upon the overall flow of the prototype in the beginning stages of development.
• Medium: using Adobe XD/Figma UI Kit to create a static, flat composition that produces a “look” that can be critiqued by other designers, and perhaps is used for some light testing.
• High: using the medium-fidelity prototype to produce a responsive prototype that resizes to different browser widths, and has the ability to show more complex transitions and animations.

Insight: Designers choose different levels of fidelity throughout the design process to maximize time efficiency while still portraying sufficient information to users and stakeholders.

• Most designers in our surveys and our interviews prototype in at least two of the three levels of fidelity, but where to cut out time in their process differs from team to team.
• For example, the Buyer team is able to start on higher fidelity prototypes in Webflow because the features, patterns, and styles they use on their prototypes are fully mature and built-out in Webflow. However, of all designers that we talked to about Webflow, only the Buyer team was able to do this. Other teams such as the Premier team and Salesforce team wish they had the components they needed built out so they could leverage the high fidelity that Webflow provides, but since these components are not mature for these teams, Webflow becomes more of a pain than a help.

The Need For High Fidelity Prototypes

“Having a prototyping tool that allows us to fake a real site is very useful for thinking through different user stories and edge cases. It also helps with testing as participants can use prototypes almost exactly as they would the actual site.”

 – Senior Advisor, Product Design

Insight: With a lot of Dell Digital’s products, complex interactions are required to fully demonstrate the look and feel of the product to better convince stakeholders and users of the prototype.

Design Language System (DLS) Usage

Findings: 

• Almost all designers like using the DLS because they think it is faster to just drag and drop components into their designs without needing to worry about the accessibility and if the component is consistent with the rest of the design.
• However, many designers told us how the current state of DLS isn’t mature enough, or teams are needing to build the DLS while using it. This creates frustration as designers must constantly redo their designs to stay consistent with the changing DLS or basically redo their previous work to make the DLS compatible with a newly introduced tool.

Insight: A discrepancy exists between how designer prefer to use the DLS, but 88 percent of the surveyed designer do not use the DLS and design from scratch. This discrepancy mainly stems from the underlying value of time. Because the DLS is usually being concurrently used and developed, this creates duplicate work for designers.

Discovery & Framing

Findings: 

• Most designers have expressed positive opinions about collaboration tools such as Miro to organize the different Discovery and Framing (DnF) activities their team partakes in.
• When designers come into a project after the DnF phase has already begun, they feel disconnect as product managers already have user flows and project requirements posted. Designers follow those requirements as they wireframe, but they do not understand the why, or the problem they are trying to solve. 

“We are supposed to use DnF, which we do if we have enough time – but that’s not generally the case.” 

 – Product Design Advisor

Insight: In the times designers have been able to carry through with DnF activities, there is not enough time to create thorough user personas, to properly map out user journeys, and truly empathize with the user base the Dell Digital Way encourages.

Stakeholder Communication

Findings:

• Product managers do not understand that part of the designer’s job is to iterate on prototypes, to find data supporting their design decisions, to ask questions, to be part of the framing stage of product development.
• Designers have expressed struggles in the design quality assurance phase of development: they wish that design validation would be a stage that is tied into the design process.

“Designers spend a lot of time researching and validating the decisions, I wish we had a say in the implementation as well.”

Insight: Stakeholder communication proves even more difficult when they do not understand what the role of the designer is, especially in teams that have not worked with designers before.