whyprototype

5 Reasons Why You Need to Prototype

While skipping prototyping might save some time during design, that surplus can be lost many times over in development. If people try on jeans before buying them and test-drive cars before signing the check, then it only makes sense to test your designs interactively before they go into development. Interaction, after all, is how users access the design solutions to their problems.
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To better understand why you should prototype, let’s look to Todd Zaki Warfel, the designer who wrote the book on prototyping… literally. Warfel summarizes his book’s points in a slideshow presentation, where we can see all the relevant reasons to embrace prototyping. While these vary depending on designers and their needs, some universal benefits include:
  • Communication & collaboration — It’s one thing to discuss requirements documentation, but it’s a whole other level of imaginative collaboration when both parties can play with a prototype and explore limitations and possibilities. Documentation can be misinterpreted, but experiences are shared.
  • Gauge feasibility while reducing waste — Wireframes, mockups, and requirement documents live in paper, not reality. Prototyping allows teams to experiment, giving them the freedom to fail cheaply while learning more. Just take a look at how prototypes helped increase estimate accuracy by 50% while reducing requests for clarification by 80%.
  • Sell your idea — Prototypes can be great for pitching if you’re working with skeptical clients. Experiencing the real-life website or app proves your vision more than a wordy description or mockup bogged down with notes.
  • Test usability earlier — By user-testing a prototype, you’re able to find problems and fix them earlier in the process, saving yourself a huge hassle of dealing with them when they’re cemented in code. The same case study cited above saw 25% reduction in post-release bugs thanks to prototyping.
  • Set your design priorities — We recommend prototyping early and often because prioritizing interaction design will keep you grounded in reality when you make static design decisions. The visuals must fulfill the experience, not the other way around.
How Prototypes Improve 
Collaboration & Communication
Showing is always better than telling, and experience is king. If people can interact with your ideas, then they’re better able to understand them. This works both externally — pitching to clients and stakeholders — and internally — in collaborating more deeply with your team, or rallying them to support a new idea (or at least play with it first before axing it).
Prototypes clarifies internal communication in a few ways.
 An interactive prototype, on the other hand, requires little description. Prototypes help stakeholders think about the experience, instead of falling on the crutch of criticizing visual elements just because they’re right in front of their eyes. On a side note, prototypes also add flair to presentations — people can literally experience the “magic” of design: it’s the difference between seeing the blueprint versus exploring the model house.

Prototyping is the phase in which the conceptual becomes real, so it requires both creativity with practicality, rationale with intuition.

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  • Decision-making — Important design choices concerning ergonomics, shape, function, production — sometimes all at once — are finalized in the prototyping phase. A working prototype will give you instant feedback so you can make an educated decision (not just a heuristic one).
  • Focus — With concrete feedback for all senses (instead of simply “guessing” what the final product will be like), prototypes ground you in user reality. UX priorities become apparent when you can experience them right in front of you.
  • Parallelism — The design process doesn’t have to be sequential. Gathering feedback, setting requirements, and brainstorming new concepts and interactions can all happen at the same time while prototyping, and when done right will complement each other.