Wireframing and the Purpose of Ugly Prototypes

For the last few months, I have been working on a bunch of projects that cannot be published or shown yet, and it’s probably going to stay like that for a while longer.

Given the circumstances, this project is quite chaotic at the moment, but the screenshot below seems fitting.

The first model for testing.


I’m currently working on the concept and functionality for a mobile app for teenagers.

One of the more exciting things about protoyping versus doing visual design is that sometimes, you want to use the ugliest design you can come up with. For testing functionality, we don’t want testers to be distracted by how the prototype looks because they are supposed to focus on the functionality.

Here, we are testing with teenagers and we have found that the worse it looks, the more they just ignore the visual design entirely.