What is prototyping
Prototyping is an integral part of the User Experience design because it allows us to test our ideas quickly and improve on them quickly. The Institute of Design at Stanford encourages a “bias towards action”, where building and testing is valued over thinking and meeting. However, why is prototyping so important in the design process? Moreover, how does it help us create human-centered design solutions? Before we start making prototypes to test our assumptions by prototyping.
Imagine ideas being executed by people with an obsession for making big changes in society or just completely re-inventing the wheel, only to realize right at the end of their journey that they've been wasting their time or focussing on the wrong thing. This is where prototyping comes in by providing a set of tools and approaches for properly testing and exploring ideas before too many resources get used. Many of us used prototyping in our early childhood when we created mock-ups of real-world objects with the simplest of materials such as paper, card, and modeling clay or just about anything else we could get our hands on. There is not much difference between these types of prototypes and the early rough prototypes we may develop at the earlier phases of testing out ideas.
A prototype is a simple model of a proposed solution used to test or validate ideas, design assumptions and other aspects of its conceptualization quickly and cheaply, so that the designers involved can make necessary refinements or possible changes in direction. Prototypes can take many forms, and just about the only thing in common the various forms have is that they are all tangible forms of your ideas. They don't have to be primitive versions of an end product. Simple sketches or storyboards used to illustrate a proposed experiential solution, rough paper prototypes of digital interfaces, and even role-playing to act out a service offering an idea are examples of prototypes. Prototypes do not need to be full products. We can prototype a part of a solution to test that specific part of our solution.
Research during the early stages of our design project does not tell us everything we need to know to create the best solution. Regardless of whether we have researched thoroughly and gathered a large body of information, or whether our ideation sessions have resulted in what we think of as a world-changing solution, testing is still crucial for success. Design teams can easily become fixated on the research artifacts they gathered during the earlier phases of exploration, creating a bias towards their ideas. By prototyping and then testing those prototypes, we can reveal assumptions and biases that we have towards our ideas, and uncover insights about our users that we can use to improve our solutions or create new ones.
We can use prototyping as a form of research even before other phases in design, allowing us to explore problem areas in interfaces, products or services, and spot areas for improvement or innovation. Prototyping is about bringing theoretical ideas to life and exploring their real world impact before finally executing them. All too often, design teams arrive at ideas without enough research or validation and expedite them to final execution before there is any certainty about their viability or possible effect on the target group. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.