The prototype design is a process that details how designers do everything required to test, iterate, and develop prototypes, beginning with user flows and ending in functional wireframes. The process of prototyping, from creating simple wireframes to testing fully functional mockups, is one of the most powerful sets of skills any designer can master. No matter how diligent your business is with prototyping, the actual process can always make or break your final product.
How and why to build a prototype is often a mystery. If you ask designers, they will tilt their heads like they are confused. They would say to you that you should just do it. And true enough: we all know how to create a prototype. This is particularly critical considering how prototypes are often the most valuable deliverable. Clients and managers want to see what you did, whether it is a website or a physical product. They want to try it out, inspect the various elements, and understand the workflow. They want to see how it works.
The journey of developing a new product involves various steps. Planning and testing your ideas before implementing them is the best way to make sure that your brand can release the right products. That is what prototyping does, implement ideas into tangible form and explore their real-world impact before finally executing them.
Prototyping 101
Prototypes are early samples, models, or releases of products built to test a concept or process. There are many contexts in which semantics can be used, for instance, in design, electronics, and software programming. Commonly, prototypes are used by system analysts and users to improve the precision of a new design.
Prototyping is an essential step in the design thinking process and is often used in the final testing stage. Every product has a target audience and is designed to solve their problems in some way. To assess whether a product solves its users' problems, designers create an almost-working model or mock-up of the product, which is called a prototype, and test it with prospective users and stakeholders.
Therefore, prototyping allows designers to test the practicability of the current design and potentially investigate how trial users think and feel about the product. It allows proper testing and exploring design concepts before too many resources get used.
A prototype is a product built to test ideas and changes until it resembles the final product. You can mock up every feature and interaction in your prototype as in your fully developed product, check if your idea works, and verify the overall user-experience strategy.
Prototyping lets you build simple, small-scale prototypes of your products, and use them to monitor, record, and assess user performance levels or the users' general behavior and reactions to the overall design. Designers can then make appropriate refinements or possible alterations in the right direction.
Prototypes can be of any form, from simple sketches and storyboards to rough paper prototypes and even role-playing prototypes that act as a service offering. They do not need to be complete products. You can prototype a part of a product to test that part of your solution. Often, prototypes are quick and rough, designed for early-stage testing and understanding, and at times full-formed and detailed, aimed for pilot trials towards the project's final stages.
7 Advantages of Prototyping
The purpose of a prototype in design thinking is to test products and product ideas previous to launch. Prototypes are simulations or samples of final products that are used as testing tools. It is intended to test products and product ideas before investing a great deal of time and resources into creating a sellable product.
One of the key aspects of prototyping is that it generates empathy for prospective consumers. In this regard, designing software or designing products for human use are not much different. Any product designed without understanding the customer's needs can result in unnecessary features, poor designs, and a variety of problems. By prototyping, you can have some advantages. Here are some of them.
1. Reducing Risks
Projects with a complete prototyping process are at lower risk than projects without prototyping. This is because the process directly affects project resources, time, and budget. Through it, it is possible to estimate the resources needed and the time for development.
2. Enhance Website Quality
A well-designed prototype will enable you to do the following. Conduct testing for the site usability, access information on the site, inspect site navigation and determine the correct placement of visual accents, among many other things.
3. Repeat at Lower Costs
Information gathered from potential clients through prototyping makes it possible to improve the product until an optimal product is developed. A good idea can be to create several prototypes before the launch of mass production so that the additional costs of unsold products and reprogramming can be curtailed.
4. Simulate the Future Product
The most significant advantage of prototyping is that it creates a model of the final product. It helps attract customers to invest in the product before any resource funding for implementation. Here is where you can discover design errors and check their correctness before going into production.
5. Evaluate Technical Feasibility
Creating a prototype makes it possible to concretize an idea and assess which features pose difficulty to implement. Prototyping can hence identify unanticipated physical, technical, or financial constraints.
6. Present Ideas to Customers
Prototyping makes it possible to present your future product to potential customers before the actual launch of the product. It also allows you to devise your marketing strategies better and start pre-sales.
7. Planning
Through prototyping, the design team gets essential information that helps them to plan out the implementation. A prototype helps build user stories and emphasizes user needs.
Bottom Line
Prototyping is a top-notch tool for designing. If you learn to carry out the process correctly, you will be a step ahead of the average designer and on the way to becoming an expert in the field.
