Comment by gattilorenz

It definitely is a thing, we literally teach this to CS students as part of the design process in the UX design course.

It’s called prototyping, in this case it would be a hi-fi prototype, and it lets you communicate ideas, test the implementation and try out alternatives before committing to your final product.

Lo-fi prototyping usually precedes it and is done on pen and paper, Figma, or similar very basic approaches.

Google (unsurprisingly) uses it and has instructional videos about it: https://youtu.be/lusOgox4xMI