Is Justin Bieber working for your company? Is pseudo Latin your native language? Probably not.
Making demonstrators for customers should not only show relevance in customer or employee value, it should also make the demo relevant by using appropriate content. As relevant as friendly names can be, make sure they are relevant to the customer and their business, not just funny for the concept or anonymous placeholders.
With our design team I recently had the wonderful opportunity to create a number of very fascinating mobile app concepts to engage employees. While creating them a lot of placeholder data was used to show how the screen layout works with content. Typically, funny as they are, the designers used names of people like Justin Bieber, Christina Aguilera and some one named it Miley Cyrus. Also the ever-infamous lorem ipsum took quite some screen space.
The designs were great – off course; I am working with great designers 😉 – but somehow the discussions in the evaluation of the concepts were influenced negatively by the somewhat funny celebrity names and irrelevant pseudo content.
When creating demonstrators and clickable prototypes make sure to stay close to the concept and the company you are addressing by using regular names and real, valid content. A design, and the discussion around it is so much more valid if actual and realistic content is presented. If you choose the right content it might even touch the heart of the customer and inspire them to think and talk about the great possibilities. Anything is better than talking about Bieber.
This relevance keeps the discussion where it should be; the concept, and not the irrelevant content.