Prototype with real data, not lorem ipsum

Most designs look finished because the data in them was chosen to make them look finished: tidy names, round numbers, three items in every list. Then real content arrives. A stop with a forty-character name, a ticket with no price, a list of four hundred journeys, and a screen reader announcing all of it.

In this workshop Hannah teaches the method Kitebird uses to put real data into prototypes from the first week. You will take a small public dataset, shape it into a few dozen realistic records, and wire it into a prototype that shows the extremes: the longest, the shortest, the missing and the strange. Then you will test it in pairs, with a screen reader and at the largest text size.

You will leave with a prototype that has already failed in useful ways, and a routine for doing the same on your own product.

What you will take away

• A method for building a small, realistic dataset that covers the extremes your product will meet
• How to wire real data into a prototype without writing a full front end
• A ten-minute accessibility check you can run on any prototype

Before you come

• A laptop and charger, with your usual prototyping tool installed
• A code editor and an up-to-date browser; we share a starter project on the day
• Headphones, for the screen reader exercise
• Optional: a small, non-sensitive export of data from your own product