The danger of mockups

I've been a proponent of MVP and agile startups for so long that I forgot what it was like to be doing anything else. I build applications so quickly that it has become second nature to me.

I felt like I was able to step back into the shoes of someone non-technical when I had my first call with a student today on Bloc. I saw his mockup, in all its glory and polish and all of the users so busily creating new data and contributing inside the Photoshop layers.

The problem with mockups is they show what the final product should look like. They skip over the entire customer development cycle and all of the iterative development that goes on in a real startup or project. They look so good, yet they're so uninformed and misguided with all of these users that aren't actually on the site yet.

If someone was trying to create Facebook, they might mock up something that looks like it does today, but Facebook started out as an ugly web site for Harvard students to see who else was in their class.

I would recommend to future students that they not bring mockups to their first call, just ideas and simple wireframes. The user will do the rest of the work.