Paper first: prototyping analytics on printed screens
Digital prototyping tools are excellent for motion and click-through paths. They are less honest about analytics design. A named layer in Figma can look tidy while still encoding three different meanings for the same tap across three screens.
We keep a paper pass in almost every Interaction Analytics Prototype engagement. Printed frames of the primary journeys go on the table. Sticky dots mark fire points. Edge notes capture property names in plain language before they become snake_case fields.
Stakeholders who struggle to follow a dense spreadsheet often engage immediately with a marked printout. Disagreements surface early: marketing wants a ‘share intent’ event; research wants only completed shares. The paper prototype makes that tension visible in minutes.
Only after the room agrees on marks do we translate the sheet into annotated mid-fidelity screens and the handoff brief. The paper step is not nostalgia — it is a cheap way to keep app interaction analytics grounded in human agreement.