Prototypes force decisions, creating clear shared goals and priorities for your project.

Prototyping has become a crucial stage of any development cycle. It's where innovative ideas and technological possibilities truly meet the expectations of the customer. Every prototype is a battlefield of sorts, where some ideas are solidified while are left behind. Just before expensive development-hours are spend on misalignment of priorities, or misunderstandings about how to create the best possible experience.

Seeing a prototype is often the first time all of the internal team members truly get a feel for what it is they need to accomplish. Whether you are on the business side of things, sales, marketing or the executive level - or the development side as a designer or programmer, you can now see what it is you are making and provide valuable insights that could add tremendous value to the project.

The process

1. Define the objectives

A prototype can be useful as early as the initial idea or prototypes can help breathe life into an otherwise technocratic list of functional requirements. It can be used to iterate on existing processes or redesign an existing application from the ground up. Either way, its important to determine what goal both the application and the prototype aim to reach, and adjust accordingly.

2. Prioritizing objectives

Often times the list of goals and functions reach well beyond the scope of a single prototype, or the time allowed to make such a prototype. Arranging these goals by order of their priorities will help us define the minimal viable product (MVP) of both the prototype and the product itself. This has proven to be a remarkably valuable process before a single line of the prototype has been drawn.

3. Create the prototype

After we've defined our 'MVP' (list of top priority functions that should be included in the app or website), the design process goes digital. First, a low fidelity prototype is build, often in a matter of days (sometimes hours), with the primary goal of having a starting point to build on. This starting point is reviewed, initial assumptions are either confirmed or adjusted, and the prototype gets expanded on until we're ready to show the world (or the team) what the app or website could look like. In this initial stage, the prototype is still little more than an interactive wireframe. Copy is still a rough indication but should convey the intent of various interactions.

4. Show, tell and iterate

The main benefit of rapid prototyping is how it allows for lots and lots of feedback and iterations. That's why I prefer design cycles of one or two days (sometimes hours) rather than extended periods of time. The goal should always be to get input on how to improve the prototype, make it smarter, better and more in line with the needs of all parties involved. Though user-testing and piloting the prototype should be done with care and strict boundaries, getting feedback from the team (including field experts, designers, developers, writers, sales and marketing) will prove to be incredibly valuable during this stage of the process.

5. Increase fidelity

Once we get the iterations going, I also aim to increase the fidelity of the prototype so processes become increasingly detailed in both their design, interactivity and responsiveness. This expands as far as the budget allows or the project requires. Some prototypes I've build were indistinguishable on the outside from the final product, others only served as conceptual templates to expand on in later stages of the project.

Eventually, the prototype will have reached the objectives as defined in our first step, and your project will be the better for it. It will have created an aligned understanding of what it is your team is building, prevented expensive mistakes in both direction and priority of the app or tested the waters of an idea at low cost.

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‍Want to see if your app or website could benefit from prototyping? Or do you want to design a new app and build it on the principles of fast iterations and prototyping? Let me know, I'd love to talk about it!