Did your design turn out any different from the prototype? If it happened, most probably it was because devs struggled with translating your design into code.
🤔 What if they did not need much translating?
🤔 What if they could share the same components?
🤩 Component-driven prototyping makes it possible!
What is component-driven prototyping?
It’s a method of prototyping in which designers build user interfaces with components that are interactive by default.
The result: prototypes behave like real products and they’re ready to be tested by real users or stakeholders. In short, prototypes get you more valuable feedback… but you also can use those components to eliminate design drift.
Let’s see how.
Most design systems have component libraries
Design systems contain product principles, pattern libraries, style guides, etc. that codify product design and development.
More mature design systems also have component libraries with reusable UI elements that engineers use in their process to ship features faster and stay consistent.
Developers can build components by themselves or use an open-source library, such as MUI, Bootstrap, Ant Design, and so on.
They can also use tools like Storybook, Git repositories or npm packages to access and store component libraries. So how does it relate to designers?👇
Using interactive components in prototyping
Product development process starts with design. A team of product designers research, plan, and test a solution before encapsulating their vision in the prototype.
They then pass the design to the dev team and here’s when the problem arises. Devs cannot translate their design properly.
How to fix that?
Stop drawing abstract vectors to represent product interactions. Use interactive components that your developers can understand. Fix the drift exactly when it happens.
Try component-driven prototyping
Connect product design and development processes by sharing the same components. Merge technology lets you import components to UXPin where designers can build interactive prototypes that are easily shared with the engineering team.
Developers copy the code behind shared elements instead of imagining what designers wanted them to build.
Now, you don’t need an active dev’s support to try component-driven prototyping. You can import components by yourself with npm integration.
You just need a component library with an npm package (for example MUI) to bring components into UXPin with just a package name.
Check how it works. 👇
Want to see more? Follow our instructions on how to import MUI 🚀or Ant Design components 🔥 to UXPin.