Prototyping with Real Data Instead of Lorem Ipsum

A recurring failure pattern across early client projects was designing a card component with 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet' as the title, which wraps predictably and looks tidy, only to have real product names — some 8 characters, some 60 — break the layout entirely in production. Engineers would flag it post-launch as a bug, but it wasn't a bug; it was a design assumption that never got stress-tested against actual content.

We now pull real (or realistic, anonymized) data into Figma using plugins that connect to a client's actual database or a representative CSV export, so mockups show real product names, real customer names of varying lengths, real timestamps, and real numeric ranges instead of neatly padded placeholders. It's more setup work upfront, but it surfaces layout problems during design review instead of during a client demo or, worse, in production.

Real data also exposed content problems we wouldn't have caught otherwise — a client's product catalog included items with names in three different scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, and CJK characters) because of a global supplier list, and our initial typeface choice didn't have full glyph support for all three. That's the kind of gap lorem ipsum, or even realistic English test data, simply can't reveal, and it would have shipped broken for a meaningful slice of the catalog.

Edge-case data is as important as typical data in a prototype. We deliberately include the longest realistic string, a zero value, a negative number if the field allows it, and an empty or null field in every dataset we prototype with, rather than only clean, average-case examples. A dashboard metric card that looks great with '$4,200' needs to be checked against '$0' and against '-$1,340' too, because both happen in real usage and often reveal formatting or color-coding assumptions baked into the design.