In order to achieve product-market fit in a competitive industry, you need to get smart faster than your competition, and you must adapt faster than the environment is changing. In war, it’s called guerrilla tactics or maneuver warfare. In business, it’s the core of disruptive innovation and it’s how incumbents get out-competed by startups. A team that learns and adapts faster can beat a bigger, richer, slower team.
The best organizations have systems in place to efficiently acquire and make use of high quality feedback. But sometimes the only honest feedback loop a company has is building-and-releasing-the-product, which is the slowest, costliest way to discover how your users will respond.
For interactive products and services, the best way to get smart faster is with prototypes. The label prototype is applied to a broad category of design, but every example has a purpose in common: to simulate the experience of using your product. Simulating the experience is easier and faster than building the real thing, which means prototypes produce actionable feedback earlier.
Prototypes come in many forms, but I think of them in three categories:
Makeshift Prototypes are created with whatever tools and resources you have at hand. A makeshift prototype could be a paper prototype, using printed wireframes or mockups. It could be a Powerpoint with click targets. It might even be a bunch of JPEGs. Makeshift prototypes can be the quickest to create, but they also require the most work from the facilitator to sufficiently simulate the user experience.
Interactive Prototypes are created using a prototyping tool like Figma, InVision, Adobe XD, Sketch, Framer, Axure, Principle, Proto.io, or UX Pin. These tools make it easy to design screens, wire up click-throughs, simulate navigation, and demonstrate hover effects and animation, but their most important feature is that they make it easier to simulate the chronological (changing over time) nature of a product experience.
Much of my work has been on products with complex back-end logic, analytics, or trading models that would take significant development resources to create. By simulating this content in an interactive prototype, we can test and refine product ideas before committing engineering resources.
Interactive prototypes can be very realistic, but it is possible to exceed their ability to manage workflow complexity.
Complex Prototypes are created using the same front-end technologies as production applications. These prototypes are still faster to build than the actual product because they simulate the backend, omit out-of-scope features , and skip the testing requirements of production code. These prototypes can scale to the same level of complexity as the actual UI.
In my experience, complex prototypes generate the most eye-opening feedback, especially when product involves from multiple users interacting with each other in realistic conditions. When features are interconnected, a single event may trigger changes to onscreen text, update data visualizations, modify status notifications, and spawn new windows. The value in the application is not any one of these features in isolation, but rather how they interact with each other to provide a rich user experience. The only way to simulate them is a complex prototype.
It's meaningless to rank these categories; none of them is "best," and they each have a role in a robust design process. With new ideas, use makeshift prototypes to flesh out concepts and flush out problems. Use interactive prototypes to iterate design concepts and get rapid feedback from more realistic scenarios. And finally, invest in complex prototypes to test interconnected concepts and develop the product before committing precious development and engineering resources.
Prototypes offer the the most efficient path to delivering maximum user value. As designers, we are in a unique position to make our organizations smarter, and we should use every tool we have to do so.