Prototyping is a fundamental aspect in the design environment, which is unfortunately often categorized as a waste of time.
Instead, it allows you to understand the interaction and value of a product or service before proceeding with development and bringing it to the market.
In fact, it is possible to extend prototyping to any branch of design: from those who make paper clothes before the finished product, to those who make models of furniture and buildings to scale, to those who draw a logo by hand.
The importance of the Prototype
Prototyping has taken a new direction, evolved over time, with new methods, approaches and tools, and is used throughout a design process for various reasons: developing ideas, validating concepts, gathering feedback, exploring technologies, making decisions, discovering others. opportunities for improvement.
Prototyping allows you to perceive the added value of the product or service in question.
Thanks to some technologies, today the way to tell and show a space, a physical or digital product is no longer limited, thanks to virtual reality and augmented reality, but also to special software that everyone can use. Having said that, the analog modes can always be used, but with new technologies everything becomes very fast and allows you to design in a short time at low costs.
But to what extent does the prototype have to match the final product?First of all, you need to understand which aspect of the product (design, level of interactions or content) you want to refer to and, subsequently, you need to understand which aspect our team wants to have feedback on.
Depending on the goal and the development phase, prototypes can be created with different levels of accuracy:
- Low-Fidelity Prototype (low accuracy): made on paper during the early stages of brainstorming, it allows users to receive suggestions and feedback very quickly;
- High-Fidelity Prototype (high accuracy): specific tools are used to create more realistic prototypes in terms of functionality and design, able to show the possibilities of a new technology. Certainly more expensive in terms of time and implementation, but which allow us to carry out in-depth usability tests.
For the optimal success of a product or service design evaluation process, the two systems can be used together.
These two tools have been designed to collaborate, this means that the ideal would be the creation of a Low-Fidelity Prototype in the first place, to collect information and opinions in the shortest possible time and only later, on the basis of what has been found, develop a High-Fidelity Prototype with already a large number of user feedback collected.
The advantages of UX Prototyping
Design improvement
We take a pencil and paper and start jotting down our ideas. This is the simplest and most functional way to build a prototype.
The best way to test and enhance the idea we want to achieve is to simulate the way in which people, or rather users, will interact with what we are designing.
Improvement of Communication
Thanks to the use of prototypes, communication between the designers and the actors directly involved in the project is facilitated, such as programmers, project managers and the customer himself.
Another purpose of the prototype is therefore to facilitate and improve the process of understanding a project idea. Leaving the ability to directly experience a feature will have a completely different meaning than explaining it verbally or with the aid of static images.
The prototypes, in fact, convey the message "as it could be".
Certainly the communication between designers and developers is the flow that benefits most from all this, since it allows the former to provide guidelines in terms of visuals and behaviors, and the latter to proceed with development more quickly.
Receiving feedback and usability testing
User feedback and usability tests are a very important resource to understand if our site has usability problems.
During the test sessions you can use very simple prototypes made on paper, or conduct the same tests giving the possibility to the users involved to use a version of the product very similar to the final one.
Whichever approach you choose, these tests must be done during the product design phase, not at the end. By doing so we will be able to intervene and integrate new improvement solutions.