Prototyping can save time and money, enables speed to market, and helps products go further faster.
“Time is money” is an oversimplification and common idiom rooted in truth.
Prototype your product to protect your brand. The risks are much lower than launching a flawed product, reducing risk, and avoiding detrimental costing-cutting measures. Product design prototyping can save time and money, enables speed to market, and helps products go further faster.
What Is Product Design Prototyping?
Product design prototyping creates a scale or full-size model of a product, which tests form, function, and feasibility. There are four categories of prototypes, each suited for testing different assumptions, that yield the following benefits:
Desirability — Form a compelling argument for what users want from a product: Verify the market demand.
Usability — Access product goals to avoid users abandoning your product or service: Receive faster user feedback for product integration. Identify errors (i.e., design, technical, and operational) and proactively strategize around product opportunities. Nimble companies increase the likelihood of getting to market faster with a robust prototype.
Viability — Clear a path for product validation: Validate future product feature work without “going all in” on capital investment. The path to product validation comes with practicality and a smaller price tag. With the advent of digital prototyping, you can go from CAD design to digital prototype in hours — at a fraction of the cost of physical prototyping.
Feasibility — Improve product cost-efficiency: Conduct an informed cost-benefit analysis with a line of sight into the product scope. Product design prototyping avoids costly mistakes and hedges against making expensive product changes. It is less expensive to make changes to a prototype than to make changes to products in the post-production stage.
Example: Product Board’s prototype (pictured above) led the way for a Slack integration built and deployed in 20 days
JustInMind’s prototype (pictured above) narrowed the team’s usability test scope and minimized product scope creep.
Pro Tips for Strategic Prototyping
Prototyping is a practical approach rife with pitfalls if not approached strategically. Ideally, teams can leverage prototypes to test quickly without the substantial product development costs associated with product development. Alternatively, prototyping without a purpose risks the onset of design debt and sinks of cross-collaborative teams.
Pro Tip #1: Design for simplicity. Taking a low-fidelity prototype and building on the user experience in the high-fidelity version solidifies basic functionality with less distracting feature work.
Design for simplicity: Overcomplicating a design prototype can cause additional turnaround times and costs. Opt for the lowest performance classification that stakeholders’ pain points as a baseline and a starting point.
Design to maximize prototype iteration speed: A best practice for enabling design is acquiring and following design governance guidelines.
Design for the maximum yield rate: Employ a first-pass yield calculator during the procedure to avoid scope creep.
Minimize the number of prototype iterations required: Numerous prototype iterations can cause high design costs, significantly impacting product operation costs.
The Big Picture: Product Design Meets Product Strategy
A robust product strategy defines a product vision and identifies inputs for realizing that vision. So, where does prototyping fit into product strategy?
A prototype is a working model that exemplifies the product vision and perfects the requirements needed to bring the product to market. Markets move fast, and more of your competition will experiment to improve their market position. It’s better to test and build than be left with an outdated business.