Prototyping is an experimental process where design teams implement ideas into tangible forms from paper to digital. Teams build prototypes of varying degrees of fidelity to capture design concepts and test them on users. With prototypes, you can refine and validate your designs so your brand can release the right products.

“They slow us down to speed us up. By taking the time to prototype our ideas, we avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too complex too early and sticking with a weak idea for too long.”

— Tim Brown, CEO & President of IDEO

Remarkable reasons for prototyping

Prototyping is the fourth phase of both design thinking and design sprints. It’s an essential part of user experience (UX) design that usually comes after ideation, where you/your team have created and selected ideas that can solve users’ needs. In prototyping, you craft a simple experimental model of your proposed product so you can check how well it matches what users want through the feedback they give.

You should consider prototyping from early on—using paper prototyping, if appropriate—so the feedback you gather from users can help guide development.

A user interface prototype is a hypothesis — a candidate design solution that you consider for a specific design problem. The most straightforward way to test this hypothesis is to watch users work with it.

There are many types of prototypes, ranging anywhere between any of these pairs of extremes:

• Single page vs. multipage with enough menus, screens, and click targets that the user can completely finish a task
• Realistic and detailed vs. hand-sketched on a piece of paper
• Interactive (clickable) vs. static (requiring a person to manipulate different pages and act as a “computer”)

The choice of the prototype will vary greatly depending on the goals of the testing, completeness of the design, tools used to create the prototype, and resources available to help before and during the usability tests. But, whatever prototype you may use, testing it will help you learn about users' interactions and reactions, so you can improve the design.

The advantages of prototyping

1. Have a solid foundation from which to ideate towards improvements—giving all stakeholders a clear picture of the potential benefits, risks, and costs associated with where a prototype might lead.
2. Can adapt changes early—thereby avoiding commitment to a single, falsely-ideal version, getting stuck on local maxima of UX, and later incurring heavy costs due to oversights.
3. Show the prototype to your users so they can give you their feedback to help pinpoint which elements/variants work best and whether an overhaul is required.
4. Have a tool to experiment with associated parts of the users’ needs and problems—therefore, you can get insights into less-obvious areas of the users’ world (e.g., you notice them using it for additional purposes or spot unforeseen accessibility issues such as challenges to mobile users).