Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

We had a hard and fast rule at my last job. ALL demos were either 100% real, or were mock-ups from Balsamiq. If it looked like someone doodled it on paper we didn’t have to worry it would be taken as working.

We came to this rule after far too many incidents where some sort of mock up (Photoshop, HTML, whatever) was shown and taken as done. Then we got the questions (possibly unhappily) about where it was and when it would be done because obviously ”it must be” since we “showed it”.

The rule served us incredibly well for years. It put a hard stop to all miscommunication. Everyone understood exactly where we were in the project. Either we knew what it was going to look like, or (if it was ready) it was done and awaiting their approval.

Shortly before I left we got a new graphic designer. He wasn’t embedded with the programmers. He didn’t know THE RULE. Sure enough, we were asked why a design we’d never seen before wasn’t ready yet. Because he made a mock up in Photoshop. He told them it was a mock up. Doesn’t matter.

We basically follow THE RULE at my current job. It still works wonders.

Ah yeah, I had a marketing/sales friend who did that the other way around: he made nice mock-ups, he even built powerpoint presentations that seemed to show the UIs actually working; he made credible ads and sales documentation with it, and he sold countless non-existing snake oil products this way ("available soon!").

As he simply was the marketing/sales guy, in case he found himself cornered he could always pretend that the failure was on the dev/technical side... "see with the support".

He could also successfully sell himself this way: once a billionaire proposed him to be the sales director of some company. He set the meeting at 7AM at the Ritz bar, and got the job (not for long : he had negotiated to keep the perks when leaving anyway).

For mockup images, you can use an unmistakably prominent watermark.

Superimpose the word "MOCK-UP" in a gigantic font that takes up nearly entirely the image.

Make it translucent and red or make it black outline. And maybe tilt it diagonally to catch attention and to make it easier to visually separate it from the rest of the image.

To streamline the process, you can just keep an image like this around to import as a topmost layer into other images.

Honestly? I’m not sure that would work. As sad as that is.

I’d like to pick your brain on how you got this started. My current company seems to run into this problem occasionally, and we use Sketch for a lot of our UI designs.

I was there at the time but to be honest I don’t remember exactly. I know that we used to use Photoshop for mock ups. I think one of the other developers found Balsamiq when they were looking for something that would be less work and we found the side benefit that the doodle looking mode prevented confusion.

Whether we realize that immediately or only after we stopped having misunderstandings I’m not sure.

But once it was realized I don’t think it took very long at all for it to become a rule. It made life so much easier for us developers.

Our non-technical stakeholders are almost guaranteed to have some minor design thing they jump on, so our equivalent was to show them only things that were functionally done, no matter how un-polished. That way they were the ones blocking any release.

Always include a duck https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1220...

Never heard that name, nice to know.

We sometimes have to do that in technical reports. The proofreaders always feel like they have to give at least one comment, so you give them a clear mistake to point out to avoid useless debate over minor points.

If you can do it that sounds like a very good strategy. We needed to be able to show mock ups of what things WOULD look like before we even start at the project so that everyone was on the same page. So we couldn’t develop functional prototypes or full working implementations to show.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com