Adopting a prototyping
mindset
Content designers don't think of themselves as prototypers. I built a workshop — then a course — to change that. Six live sessions, 43 Reality Labs content designers, and a director who liked it enough to ask us to scale it.
Content designers
don't prototype. Except they do.
In Reality Labs, prototyping is a first-class practice. Demos win debates. Showing your thinking builds trust faster than describing it. But content designers tend to sit outside that culture — we write, we review, we give feedback. We don't typically show up to crit with a sketch or a flow diagram.
The problem isn't that CDs can't prototype. It's that we don't recognize what we're already doing as prototyping. Writing three versions of a string is prototyping. Sketching a flow on paper is prototyping. Mocking up content in a wireframe is prototyping. We just weren't calling it that — or using it strategically.
Laura Osfield and I saw the gap and built the workshop.
A workshop built around
mindset, not tools.
Laura Osfield and I co-designed and co-facilitated the workshop. The design philosophy was deliberate: we didn't teach Figma. We didn't teach any specific tool. We taught a way of thinking — that iteration is the work, not a precursor to it.
The workshop opened with a provocation: "When you hear 'prototyping,' what do you think of?" Most people said Figma. High fidelity. Something polished. We spent the rest of the session dismantling that assumption.
We ran three exercises: a rapid-fire "how many ways can you write OK?" sprint, a word-sketching exercise (instructions for cooking an egg, drawn on paper), and a flow iteration exercise building out a gesture settings experience. The exercises were deliberately low-stakes and slightly absurd — because the point was to get people comfortable with imperfection, not to produce great work.
After four sessions, our director asked us to turn it into a self-service on-demand course. Rebecca Cha joined as a co-creator for that phase, and we rebuilt the workshop into a structured course available to all Reality Labs content designers.
Five methods.
Three exercises. One mindset shift.
Content that's similar to what you'd expect in the end product — storyframes, wireframe-integrated copy, word sketches. The goal is to influence design direction before it's locked.
Writing multiple versions of UI copy to explore tone, length, and messaging. The practice most CDs already do — reframed as prototyping so it gets treated as such in design reviews.
Sketching alternate flow logic at low fidelity to explore the best timing and order of content — before a single screen is designed.
Creating layout variations to find the most successful hierarchy for communicating complex information within a single screen.
Mocking up the same information across different design components to test effective delivery and readability before committing to a pattern.
Three hands-on exercises: a rapid OK-writing sprint, a word-sketch exercise, and a gesture settings flow iteration — all designed to make imperfection feel normal.
Cross-org.
All levels.
The workshop reached across the Reality Labs content design org — AR, VR, Metaverse, and MetaWorks. Five managers and a director attended. Two participants liked it enough to take it twice.
When the director asked us to scale it, that was the signal: this wasn't a one-off. It was infrastructure. Rebecca Cha joined as co-creator for the on-demand course phase, and we rebuilt the live workshop into a structured self-service course available to all Reality Labs content designers on the RL Hub.
"Huge #thanks to Ashlee Phillips and Rebecca Cha for taking the prototyping workshop we launched in 2023 and building it into a self-service class, enabling more to access it wherever and whenever they want to up their skills in prototyping!"
— Laura Osfield, Terminology Lead, Reality Labs Content Design"As Avatars Creative Leads, we're talking about adopting a principle that 'prototypes win debates,' or in other words, prototypes are a great way to get everyone on the same page and teach ourselves something new or validate our hypotheses."
— Joel Solomon, Avatars Creative Lead, in response to the course launchNot just a workshop.
A permission structure.
In post-session surveys, participants rated the workshop 4.5/5 for value and 4.4/5 for overall satisfaction. The open-ended responses pointed to something more interesting than the skills themselves: people valued the permission to prototype imperfectly.
Participants hadn't thought of strings, flows, and content hierarchy as prototyping. Naming it changed how they talked about their own work in reviews.
The hands-on format — especially the low-stakes, slightly absurd exercises — gave people practice being imperfect in a safe context. That's harder to teach than any tool.
Watching colleagues tackle the same exercise in completely different ways was itself a lesson: there's no one right way. Diverse approaches are the point.
The workshop's core insight — that CDs are already prototyping, they just don't call it that — turned out to be the most powerful reframe. When people stopped waiting to share "finished" work and started sharing iterations, the quality of their contributions to design reviews improved. Not because they got better at Figma. Because they got more comfortable being in-progress.
The ask I didn't wait for.
Nobody asked me to build a prototyping workshop. Laura and I saw the gap — content designers sitting outside a prototyping culture that was central to how Reality Labs worked — and we built the thing that addressed it.
When the director asked us to turn it into a course, that was validation. But the more interesting signal came earlier: the two participants who took it twice. That's not a metric. That's a person who found something worth coming back to.
The lesson I carried forward: community infrastructure — workshops, courses, office hours — isn't soft work. It's leverage. One workshop, six sessions, 43 people. One course, available to everyone, forever.