When the first prototype is a conversation.

A polished prototype can make an undecided idea feel finished. For a recent planning workshop, I wanted the opposite. We had a rough understanding of the problem and several reasonable ways to approach it. I brought six paper sketches instead of one convincing answer.

Make the uncertainty visible

Each sketch showed a single moment: finding a project, inviting a colleague, assigning a task or reviewing an update. I left the details rough and wrote the question we needed to answer above each screen.

The first discussion was about a missing step. A participant asked how a new colleague would know why they had been invited. We had treated the invitation as a delivery problem; they experienced it as a question of context.

Ask people to tell the story

Rather than asking which sketch they preferred, I asked participants to describe the last time they had joined a project. We laid the sketches out in the order of those stories and added blank cards wherever a step was missing.

The most useful part of the prototype was the space where someone could say, “Something happens here, before this screen.”

By the end, we had fewer screens and a better account of the journey. The invitation needed a short explanation of the project, the person inviting them and what they could do first. Those were content decisions before they were interface decisions.

Leave with a testable question

I photographed the sequence, wrote down the disagreements and chose one question for the next prototype: could a new teammate explain their first task without asking the person who invited them?

Paper was useful because changing it cost almost nothing. Once the sequence became clearer, a more detailed prototype had a purpose. Its job was to test a specific interaction, rather than give an early idea the appearance of certainty.