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Early start-ups have to fiercely battle the scarcity of resources and time in order to launch a product and break into the market at an opportune moment. Nevertheless, a product risks compromise in quality when a tight schedule and budget is imposed, which could undermine the success of the whole venture. Based on our experience with start-up products, prototyping is a great and necessary tool in the product development process to validate ideas and usability efficiently without incurring too much expenses. Instead of pouring money into engineering everything when the product is still being tested, start-ups could easily prototype products in different fidelities to pinpoint problems at different stages.
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Prototyping Helps Connects Users to the Product
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Consumers intuitively prefer products that offer the best experience. A good product recognizes the users’ many needs and addresses them in its features and design language. Through extensive user research, designers identify the user pain points to establish a hierarchy of user needs. This hierarchy is used to create a design guideline that helps the team to improve the product by keeping track of the most important features. To truly understand the user experience, the project team would create a wide range of prototypes to interact with. The interactions are documented to help create the next iteration, which narrows down the design direction and eventually leads to a final product.
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Different Levels of Prototyping
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Of course, prototyping is a recurring process in a product’s development. The constant testing and validation ensure the product is optimized and ready for market and users when it is finalized. The different levels of prototyping can be categorized into four levels to address the needs and challenges of each stage:
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1. Works like the product
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At an early stage of design, the objective is to test out and validate the user flow, therefore the appearance of the prototype does not matter. The crude quality allows designers to focus on the interaction layout and flow without getting sidetracked by the product’s visual elements. For physical products, a good example is a rudimentary foam core/cardboard model that shows knobs, buttons and key interactive features. For UIUX, it would be a wireframe mockup of the layout. This first stage of prototyping is crucial as usability informs core features that serve as the foundation for the future product.
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2. Looks like the product
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After the product’s fundamental usability is validated, prototyping is used to study if the design visually resonates with users. Market competition compels startups to put effort into developing their unique visual languages. Connecting a product’s visual elements with the start-up’s brand identity emphasizes its competitive edge. Now the prototype will look closer to the final product. Physical products need prototyping to identify the best form that follows the product utility. Through 3D printing and 3D modelling, designers can generate many iterations of visual studies. Digital products would create mid-fidelity prototypes to explore the UI options. It is important to note that these visual studies need to reference the design guideline established in the early prototyping phase, as the core utility features must be clear.
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3. Looks and works like the product
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With a visual language defined, the next round of prototyping takes a deeper dive into the user testing by combining the product’s utility with its look. Still being a prototype, the product does not need to be fully engineered. Designers can create a high-fidelity mockup to mimic the final product. Without building out the actual products, the design team can holistically review user feedback on the combination of product usability and visual design.
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4. Minimum viable product
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Finally, the product is ready for market testing. A minimum viable product is a fully engineered and functional mix between final product and prototype that includes enough features to engage your first customers. Unlike a final retail product, a minimum viable product is sold at a controlled volume to collect market feedback. The previous rounds of prototyping guarantee the lack of fatal flaws, but the product could be further perfected through the introduction of minimum viable product. The project team is able to make finalized changes to the product based on real market reactions, thereby making the product truly optimized and competitive.
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Final Thoughts
A well-polished product that thoroughly engages the users and market requires a lot of iterative testing. Recognizing the importance of prototyping and implementing it into your product development could drastically improve your project outlook. A competent design team is able to help you balance the amount and level of prototyping at different stages to achieve the optimum result with great cost and time efficiency.
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If you ever have any questions regarding your product development process, feel free to reach out to our team here at Spatial Dynamics at any time! We would be delighted to help.
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