In today’s world of digital interface design, we need to draw lots of pictures of software. We draw these pictures so that our teams have a source of truth for how our products should look, feel, and work. We draw one for each and every meaningful state a user might encounter, and we draw them all manually.
Except, we don’t do that. Even the best designers leave some states unexplored, and many designers don’t have the time or experience to explore them at all. Unexplored states often reveal deep flaws in the logic of our designs. When these flaws are only discovered in development or production, they lead to delayed releases, bad experiences, and ultimately failed businesses.
No human designer can consistently draw and maintain enough pictures to represent a perfectly logical system day in and day out. But a computer can.
Stateful design is design with logic as a core primitive. It means designing on a live canvas with interactive elements, thinking in views and states rather than frames and rectangles, and prototyping with logic instead of noodles.
Imagine designing a single screen and instantly previewing every meaningful state that screen will need to handle. When a particular state breaks the system, just redesign it and watch all the other states instantly update to reflect the change.
Stateful design means designers—along with everyone else—will finally have the power to solve problems with full creativity, evaluate solutions with full confidence, and share prototypes with full fidelity.
Create entire flows without drawing pictures.
Continuously evaluate the look and feel of a design.
Share fully functional prototypes from the start.