Comprehension isn't strategy.

Pilots in our first round of usability testing couldn’t make sense of contingencies.

Contingencies are conditions a pilot attaches to a bid group to shape how the awarded weeks relate to each other.

I want Christmas off, plus two weeks in Q1, but don’t put those two weeks back-to-back, and don’t put them in the same month.

The system has to honor the listed weeks and the structural rule.

The union contract calls them contingencies. They’re really conditions. SWAPA’s term won.

In static testing, pilots couldn’t form a strategy around them. We watched pilots squint at the screen and ask questions a designer never wants to hear: where does this go, what does this do, which one is the backup?

In the second round, we ran a fully interactive prototype, built using Figma Make and Kiro, deployed through GitLab Pages. Same feature. Same users. Different result.

Pilots breezed through contingencies. Then they did something we hadn’t seen in static testing. They tried to break the whole system with edge cases the design wasn’t supposed to allow.

They couldn’t. The validation held. They moved on.

A static prototype can answer comprehension questions. Does the user understand what this screen is showing them? Do they know what to click? Is the hierarchy clear?

But static prototypes struggle to help us answer strategy questions. Will the user actually use this tool to make the decision they need to make? Does the design hold up against real cognitive load? Will it survive a real pilot? Christmas off, two weeks in Q1, no back-to-backs, the kid’s graduation in May.

Once we put a working tool in front of them, they didn’t need to understand contingencies abstractly. They used them. The feature became legible because they were doing it, not because they were reading it.

There’s a build payoff, too. Edge cases and validation problems usually surface in detail design or during dev handoff. With the interactive prototype, we ran pilots through the same kind of adversarial testing an engineer would have surfaced six months later. We addressed it upfront. The dev team got a working artifact instead of an annotated Figma file.

Static prototypes aren’t wrong. They’re answering the wrong question.

Building a fully functional prototype with this much logic, in research-cycle time, wasn’t practical until recently. The methodology is new because the tools are new.