The Magic Of Rapid Prototyping

When you’re designing complex products, getting fast feedback is essential. In the 1930’s, Disney studios understood this. They pioneered a technique called ‘Pencil Testing’. Usually the team would write, draw & colour the whole scene to get feedback. Now, the animators drew quick rough sketches, often from templates, that would give the basic idea of the scene to stakeholders. They would incorporate feedback as they increased the fidelity and improved their designs.

For years the software industry operated with a waterfall method. It was a replication of the Henry Ford style assembly lines. One guy would work on a piece. Then ship over to the next guy. And so on. You would finish and finalise everything before the product could move to the next step. This proved slow, costly and inefficient.

Modern software isn’t built like this anymore. We work in a modular fashion. Working in small cycles, improving as we go. Gathering feedback and testing before the next cycle. We do this often for large features or entire products. We should adopt this method within our design process too.

Credit: PxHere

Too many times I’ve seen design teams want to retreat away to work on designs. They are often too precious or too soft to show them early on to get feedback. But it’s integral we see the creative dirty work. It’s important to bring along the team in the idea process. Prototyping is a quick, magic way to get these ideas in front of your team to get fast feedback.

At Mindera, we work in agile sprints. But we use prototyping to try out different ideas and concepts. Usually, we’ll prototype in sketches as much as we can. Pencil and paper may not seem very “techy”, but it’s the quickest way to explore as many possible solutions as we can. We then start to turn up the fidelity, working our way to a pretty mockup for the team to build from.

Throughout this process we incorporate team feedback. Who, when and where depends on the project and feature. But, we always include every member of the team somewhere throughout the process.

Design is more than what you make. We’re here to facilitate good design as we are to produce it. We get the whole team involved with our feedback cycles. Our designers jobs are to help bring these ideas to life so we can discuss something tangible. We’ve all been in those meetings where someone has a great idea but it’s difficult to express. Or often we are thinking of two different ideas, when it appears we have clarity. Prototyping helps give life to these ideas. Without spending a great deal of time producing them.

Prototyping’s ultimate benefit is testing with customers. This validates the ideas you have with the people who will use them. We live in a golden age of prototyping tools; from InVision to Framer to spinning up a React app. We can create a good quality prototype using UI libraries such as Material Design or Bootstrap that we can put in front of users. They think it’s proper software. Now you can see if your idea will fall flat on it’s face or not — and you can do this well before your launch date.

The more teams can take advantage of rapid prototyping, the less risky and better quality design we ship out of the door.