Popularized by Design Thinking and Lean Startup, prototyping is a commonly used method for testing and evaluating ideas in a very early stage of development. Mostly known for prototyping user interfaces, prototyping can also be used to make customer journeys, visualize ideas or just to have some fun. People say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s true, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.
Prototypes force you to think a bit harder about your idea so that you really understand your assumptions and your possible solution. It creates a tangible product for you to get out and test ideas at a very early stage of your process. Get valuable customer reactions and feedback in just a few days.
If these words haven’t got you drooling yet, we’ll give it one more shot: prototyping will make you fail fast and hopefully fail a lot so that in the end, you avoid failing big. You might even say that prototyping is based on failing. It wouldn’t be there if there weren’t any mistakes to make. As Reshma Saujani once said, “Fail fast, fail hard, fail often.”
After all, the very first step to create an innovative product is not to invent a mind-blowing idea. Instead, you need to start from an idea and iterate on it along the way. Typically, corporates are ready to invest a lot of time and money on unvalidated ideas, instead of taking a moment to quickly prototype them and validate the related assumptions, often resulting in failed concepts or products with a bad user experience.
On this page, we will share a collection of the tools and methods we use internally and with our clients.
