With modern tools, the link between visual polish and time investment is broken. Instead of worrying about "visual fidelity," judge explorations by "effort fidelity." A high-fidelity prototype created in a day is a low-effort artifact, allowing for quick, rich feedback without over-investment.
Related Insights
Designers should resist the urge to create fully functional, pixel-perfect components in AI prototyping tools. This work is often throwaway because it doesn't leverage the actual production codebase or design system, leading to wasted time and effort.
When building his own site, MDS doesn't aim for pixel-perfect Figma files. He gets the design to 85% completion, establishing the core direction, and then moves to code to finalize details like hover states and animations where the interactive "feel" is paramount.
Product teams often use placeholder text and duplicate UI components, but users don't provide good feedback on unrealistic designs. A prototype with authentic, varied content—even if the UI is simpler—will elicit far more valuable user feedback because it feels real.
Before writing code, you can string together hyperlinked screenshots in a design tool like Figma. This creates a 'hacky' prototype that feels like a fully built app to potential customers, allowing for rapid, low-cost user testing and validation.
The core advantage demonstrated was not just improving a single page, but generating three distinct, high-quality redesigns in under 20 minutes. This fundamentally changes the design process from a linear, iterative one to a parallel exploration of options, allowing teams to instantly compare and select the best path forward.
Historically, resource-intensive prototyping (requiring designers and tools like Figma) was reserved for major features. AI tools reduce prototype creation time to minutes, allowing PMs to de-risk even minor features with user testing and solution discovery, improving the entire product's success rate.
In design thinking, early prototypes aren't for validating a near-finished product. They are rough, low-cost "artifacts" (like bedsheets for walls) designed to help stakeholders vividly pre-experience a new reality. This generates more accurate feedback and invites interaction before significant investment.
AI prototyping tools have broken the traditional link between visual fidelity and process maturity. Designers can now create highly realistic, functional prototypes on day one. This makes it challenging to signal to stakeholders that a concept is still early and exploratory, leading to feedback on pixels instead of strategy.
When exploring an interactive effect, designer MDS built a custom tool to generate bitmap icons and test hover animations. This "tool-making" mindset—creating sliders and controls for variables—accelerates creative exploration far more effectively than manually tweaking code for each iteration.
Reverse the traditional design process by focusing on the "liveliness" of a site from the outset. While visuals and copy can remain low-fidelity placeholders, investing in high-fidelity transitions and motion early on establishes the core interactive feel, which is often the most crucial part of the user experience.
