Step 5 of the Design Thinking Process: Prototyping

Step 5 of the Design Thinking Process: Prototyping

Why is Prototyping used?

Prototyping helps us in bringing the best solutions to life. This is the 5th stage of the Design Thinking process. We have created ideas and prioritized them in the ideation phase. Now, we need to create something tangible from these ideas to put forth in front of the customers. This will help us in deriving meaningful insights from our target audience.

Prototyping helps create a quick model to explain our final product to our customers. Some of the major advantages of prototyping include:

  • Generating early feedback: This is important for us as it helps in understanding whether to launch, upgrade, or kill a product.
  • Saving time and cost: The aphorism, “Fail fast”, is frequently stated by many Silicon Valley firms who encourage quick prototyping.
  • Early design content: We have a roadmap and understand what works when we generate prototypes for our products.

Types of Prototypes

In this phase, we get the design team and the executive teams together in order to generate prototypes.  They together bring ideas into existence. Here, we invest the least amount of time to deliver the expected value. The aim is to identify and fix the problems early on and mitigate business risks. There are broadly 2 types of prototypes:

  1. Low Fidelity Prototypes(Lo-fi): This prototype is a very simple version created using very little materials and has little modes of interaction with the customers. It is sometimes referred to as paper prototyping as most often sketching the product is a way to create low fidelity prototypes. Wireframing is also used for lo-fi prototypes. It has a few aspects of visual design, and key elements of content and minimal interactivity. This is the way to go if we are going for an inexpensive and fast way of prototyping.
  2. High Fidelity Prototype(Hi-Fi): They are much more advanced and offer a high level of interaction with the customers. They have realistic visual design and similar-to-real content. They take a lot longer to deliver and sometimes, customers cannot make out the difference between the prototype and the real product. With Hi-Fi prototypes, we can get a lot of meaningful feedback during usability testing and test a lot of UI interactions.  
Low fidelity prototype
Low fidelity prototype

Breakdown of the process

Our aim in this step is to get some tangible functionality ready for testing with our customers. We need to remember that a prototype doesn’t necessarily have to work. It has to act as it works. Storyboarding is the primary recommended way to create prototypes. Through storyboarding, we aim at telling a story to our customers to explain our product. It can be either low Fidelity of High Fidelity.

  1. Low Fidelity Storyboarding
    • Paper prototyping or sketching: This is the fastest way of using hand-drawing and design skills. This allows rapid prototypes and can be later used for experimentation.
    • Clickable wireframes: We can use tools such as PopApps(now Marvel Apps) to create wireframes wherein we can click and move around to see the basic design. This enables us to create usable layouts easily, with an easy display for design.
  2. High Fidelity Storyboarding
    • Digital prototypes (using special tools): There are a lot of tools that help in generating visually appealing and highly interactive prototypes
    • Coded prototypes: This hi-fi prototype bears a high resemblance to the final product and allows us to get rich customer feedback. This offers high efficiency, but we should remember that it is about creating quicker customer interaction prototypes.
High Fidelity- Digital Prototypes
High Fidelity- Digital Prototypes

Takeaways from Prototyping

Prototyping helps us create quick-customer tests. We should remember that it is about the target experience, not the target products. We should keep it simple, focusing on the values. Creativity should be allowed to flow seamlessly and we should constantly strive to deliver to our customers.

It is important to choose the best method of prototyping according to our needs. Our ultimate motive is to be able to understand how the customer thinks through testing. In the testing phase, the prototype that is generated is presented to the customers for a final review before we set out for the delivery of our product.

External links:

  1. Design Thinking process
  2.  Design tools: http://www.designkit.org/methods
Tags: , , , , , , ,