What is a prototype and how does it affect a product's development flow?

UX Matters - In this 4th episode, we will explain what the advantages of prototyping in the product development flow are. Is it a waste of effort, or it can really optimize the development costs? We'll walk you through the steps to decide for yourself how it should be implemented in your UX strategy.

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Prototypes have been a part of the UX design process for quite a while now, but it hasn’t been long ago that they got the attention they truly deserve. So let’s start with a short definition, what is a prototype? It’s a simulation of a real product that is used for testing and gathering feedback giving users a much more involved experience.
It can be a low-fidelity or a high-fidelity prototype, or if you ask me, everything in-between, because its main purpose is to simulate the end product. You might be thinking what is a low fidelity or a high fidelity prototype? If we want to keep it short, a low fidelity prototype is the most basic prototype that only has sketches and its focused on clarifying the main flow of the product, without concentrating on any visual element.
On the other hand, in a high fidelity prototype, you will need to have the finished UI design and it has to have the UX logic that you would like to see in the developed product. Basically, it's a dummy version of your end product because it doesn’t have any code in the background.
So where does a prototype fit into a product-making process? Well, it depends on how detailed we want our product to be when we test it. You can create basic prototypes out of wireframes, so the main steps are obvious to the users and the test group. Or you can prepare a prototype just before the development starts so that it can be as detailed as you want the final product to be.
Let’s take a look at how a product development flow looks like: first, there is the idea, then you can decide to contact an agency to do the market and audience research, or you can do it in house, then with that data, you can start building the user persona, then put together the user flow and wireframes, create the design, get down to development, and the end product is done, right? Well, not quite.
Because this is an ideal situation but we don’t live in an ideal world. The process might have a few bumps on the road because after you are done with the wireframes, there should be a feedback round with the product team to see if everything is covered. If something is missing, you need to add those elements, or rethink a few layouts and then sit down with the team again for another feedback round. Usually, only after the second round of feedback and implementation is when the wireframes are done and the design phase can begin.
Here you can have a lot of back and forth movement with the team if the vision of the final product is not clear enough. Usually, there are one or two rounds of feedback on the design as well, that are based on design workshops so the whole team understands the meaning of each element, and only when the last UI element is covered, we can start the development process.
If we take a look at only the financial part of the project, we can immediately tell that starting the development process after the design is approved costs more than if we would invest in a prototype. That's because any change in the development process takes up more time and effort to correct than it does in a prototype. Let’s take a custom web page, for example, that has a hero section with a slider, a highlighted products section followed by news, contact info and footer.
If the UI design is already done, then the development phase should take an average of 2 weeks. On the other hand, a prototype can be presented in about 2-3 days. Give it a week if it’s a more complex site, like an e-commerce site.

#uxdesign #prototyping #productdevelopment #userexperience

Видео What is a prototype and how does it affect a product's development flow? канала Cognitive Creators