In this video, the speaker highlights that the most common oversight in design prototyping is neglecting comprehensive use cases, including both happy and sad paths. Without fully fleshed‑out user flows, prototypes often contain buttons or features that lack defined actions, leading to broken or incomplete experiences. The speaker also discusses the importance of recognizing different fidelity levels: low‑fidelity sketches versus high‑fidelity prototypes that must account for loading states, skeleton screens, API call behavior, and other nuanced interactions. Micro‑interactions are another area frequently omitted due to time, scope, or skill constraints. To avoid these pitfalls, the speaker recommends a minimum checklist: document all use cases, specify interaction states for each action (including loading animations and API latency), and detail micro‑interactions, ensuring this information is captured in design documentation or design systems even if not fully prototyped.
Chapters
What's one thing most designers forget when prototyping? Full use cases of a design. And I say that trying to say, if you don't have the happy path, the sad path, the what happens when this path happens, if you don't have the like user flows fleshed out for your design and you start designing and prototyping, a lot of the times you'll get buttons with no no actions, or there's no under— like, the designer might have thought too big of the feature and wants to put stuff but didn't have the scope to prototype it. So you end up having like a button to add a new contact but doesn't have the new contact flow. Uh, it's when there's a lot of assumptions and designers are trying to design fast, you end up getting missed things in prototypes. So yeah, it's, it's the use cases that, that end up getting missed. Now there's also a, like a level of fidelity to prototyping that I think, uh, is not really addressed sometimes because you can have prototyping that's very, you know, dissolve your way through it. And then you can have very high fidelity prototype that has how it loads, how it, um, you know, what the loading states look like, like Here's how it should— skeleton, skeleton screens, APIs being called, button when it's clicked has a loading state. There's much higher fidelity, and depending on your documentation and your design system, that sometimes doesn't need to be prototyped, but it should be discussed or it should be documented. There should be some kind of expression that says, hey, there was an API call, this is not going to load instantly like the rest of the page, it should be handled like this. I think a lot of these nuances and level of fidelity of prototyping sometimes gets mixed up and is not talked about as much. There's also micro interactions. There's like all kinds of things that happen that might not even get prototyped at all because effort, scope, and then skill set of the designer. So I think— I think at bare minimum, you need to make sure you have your use cases. Then you need to talk about how things interact at each state. If it's— I mean, if it's not documented, you should have that part of your use cases. Page— you click this, page loads, show loading animation if necessary. This information is displayed after loading. If you click this, this goes here, this happens. If you click this, this happens. This modal shows, this is the information, right? It has all the use cases, and then it also has the micro interaction, the actual state that it should load, the— this should display this way, there's an animation that waves high, like make it wave high, you know. So it has all the necessary information.
