Why prototype

You can also edit various transition options such as swipe, press-and-hold, double taps, and more. Design then lets you animate the prototype so you can see the interactions and user flows of your running prototype. Design also includes a collaboration option so you can get a URL that you can share in various ways: for unmoderated remote usability testing , a feature built into Indigo. Design so you can get rapid feedback on your prototype.

Watch this How to Prototype Video Time: for a short demo of these features. For more information on this complete design-to-code tool, visit Indigo.

Blog User Experience. Developers User Experience Business Teams. Types of Prototyping Why Prototyping is Important?

Prototypes have 4 main qualities: Representation — The actual form of the prototype, such as paper and mobile, or HTML and desktop. The staples of that concept are that low-fidelity sketches, whiteboard sessions and lightly documented ideation are all more efficient than jumping into or even doing high-fidelity wireframes and information architectures.

Those high-fidelity documents usually incur a lot of time to produce and become out of date almost immediately after creating them. This is the nugget of gold in this article: People can provide just as rich and insightful feedback on a crappy napkin sketch or a minute whiteboard session as they can for an entirely functional, beautifully designed, finished product.

Save yourself the money and show somebody a sketch. But, I digress. There is also value in high-fidelity prototyping. We can confidently start engineering some features that have the potential of making it into the final product. In addition to initial engineering, we also use tools like Principle, Framer and After Effects to start adding sophistication, movement, and interactivity to our prototypes. These tools allow us to move things around on the screen, press buttons, hear sounds and watch video so that we can start playing with things.

An extra bonus to using these tools is that they all spit out code that can be utilized once engineering starts. It is real, working software that will eventually ship. Now that you can see your product, what would you change to make it more marketable?

Provides quality assurance. By testing the prototype, you can find any issues that produces flaws in your product. You can develop quality assurance testing methods and standards before you roll out full production. Measure acceptable tolerance levels. This is your chance to decide if any design adjustments can make the production process more economical. Know the true cost of production. Each product has a certain target audience and solves their pain points in some way.

So, for understanding the exact needs and expectations of your target audience you first need to create a mock up, get it approved from stakeholders, collect feedback, consult your collaborators, make changes and then iterate the process until you have clear visualisation of what you need to build as the final product.

It is easier to collect feedback and make changes to your product at an early stage than when the product is near ready. Thus, it saves effort, cost and helps you steer the product in the right direction. A prototype is an early sample or mock up of the product we wish to build.

A prototype is a quick model explaining the actual plans for the final product. It could be something as simple as hand-drawn sketches, integrated together lo-fi prototype to demonstrate the product to a fully functional product hi-fi prototype , which the stakeholders and users can feel and use. In a nutshell prototype is an early iteration of the product, demonstrating its core functionality. Quick prototyping helps.

Let me give you an example: As I am writing this article on prototyping, I share an outline of the article with my team members. From our combined understanding and knowledge of the topic we can gauge if I have missed anything.

From them I can get genuine actionable feedback. It was that I was missing a lot. The major challenge for a designer or a developer is that he or she usually has to communicate the look and feel of the product to their product management team. With prototyping you can combat all this along with the following benefits :.

Check here to know more about how to use prototypes for user research. Designing prototypes is one part of the process. But there are various approaches to prototyping and it is always necessary to select the correct approach to your product which fits into the time and resource constraints.