How to Validate Your Visual Design Decisions

Increase fidelity earlier in your process.

Moving toward higher fidelity earlier helps you expose your visual design decisions sooner. This enables you to start making all those extremely valuable micro-improvements earlier. And with each iteration, you can become more confident in the strength of your designs.

Of course, there can be tradeoffs. Maybe your stakeholders associate visual design with done designs. Or maybe you find it challenging to develop a design system while validating features. But I’m confident that the extra work will produce better results for you. Jake Knapp does too, as he explains in day 4 of his google sprint. A realistic prototype simply helps your users react naturally.

I’d recommend taking a firm stance on visual design as early as your first round of user testing.

Prioritize the riskier UI and test them in a task based scenario.

Decide which UI decisions you’ve made that follow modern standards and push those off to the side. Those are probably fine for now.

The less common or more adventurous UI is more important right now. Maybe you found a cool way to hover drag and drop on a particular element. Or maybe another element is beautifully…