Thousands of new products are introduced into the market every single year and thousands of startups open each year. Sadly 95% of new products fail within 12 months, and less than a third of startups succeed to survive. Such turbulence in the marketplace makes it incumbent upon the leaders to take steps to ensure product success, cost-effectively. Prototyping is a tool that can ensure that the products do well and consequently the companies.
The Need for Prototyping
The main reason for prototyping is to validate the idea and this is the step in converting an idea to a real product.
Make the Right Choice
There are various choices for prototyping, such as:
Based on the above requirements, decide the type of prototype you need. Here are four types of prototyping that you may consider using when creating a new digital product or service:
1: Sketch prototyping
It involves sketching out early ideas on paper to gather quick, early feedback. This is one of the lowest fidelity ways of prototyping, as well as one of the least expensive, but a significant stage as it allows for non-designers and key stakeholders to get directly involved.
2: Paper prototyping
Paper prototyping allows you to take what you’ve learned from sketching and move this into a workable platform for your users to test further, as a physical “drag and drop”. By mocking up possible elements, this allows your users to begin experiencing individual interfaces, with example feedback possibly including:
These exercises help in improvements, the interface will through a few rounds of user feedback and iteration. Buttons may have moved slightly, Call to Actions may be larger, the wording may have changed, but how will your users interact with this on a device?
3: Mockup prototyping
Mockup prototyping allows you to put a higher-fidelity iteration into the hands of your users in a more realistic situation, such as on a smartphone device. These should be quick to produce but must look good enough to be considered “real” by your users. This type of prototyping allows users to feel like they’re using a real application or website, giving more of an observation focus in the user testing, rather than explanation.
It is ideal for observing uses, their behavior, and test various facets of the application:
4: Coded prototyping
Many iterations would now put the application’s concept into a confident spot. You’ve seen how your users move through a series of screenshots, but what about a basic coded concept?
While code is a high-fidelity method of prototyping, and it may not be as polished as the mockup version, this stage involves various learning such as:
Ruby on Rails: Is a good choice for this type of prototyping as it allows:
More Success with Better Prototypes
The research involved in building the prototype not only helps the stakeholders to understand the concept but also helps in refining the need for product/service features as well. There are thousands of products that fail every year, and better digital prototyping can go a long way in releasing the final product that users want.
Depending on the project, you may go for one of these or all of the methods of prototyping for ideal results.
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