Design Better And Faster With Rapid Prototyping — Smashing ... The old adage, "a picture speaks a thousand words" captures what user interface prototyping is all about: using visuals to describe thousands of words' worth of design and development specifications that detail how a system should behave and look. In an iterative approach to user interface design, **rapid prototyping** is the process of quickly mocking up the future state of a system, be it a ...