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What is Prototyping? | Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF)

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What is Prototyping?

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 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

Discover how prototyping can help you access your users to fine-tune ideal products.

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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.

The advantages of prototyping are that you:

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.
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.
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.
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 use).
Provide a sense of ownership to all concerned stakeholders—therefore fostering emotional investment in the product’s ultimate success.
Improve time-to-market by minimizing the number of errors to correct before product release.

Prototyping can help catch potentially costly errors well in advance.

Low-Fidelity vs. High-Fidelity Prototyping

Fidelity refers to the level of detail and functionality you include in your prototype. Usually, this will depend on your product’s development stage. You can construct one that gives a wide view of the entire system or subsystem (called a horizontal prototype – e.g., an entire website) or one that gives a detailed view of just one feature (a vertical prototype – e.g., a checkout process). The level of fidelity you choose should be appropriate for presenting to users in user testing so they can give focused feedback. Consider the differences:

Low-fidelity
- Example: Paper prototypes
- Pros: Fast and cheap; disposable; easy to make changes and test new iterations; allow a quick overall view of the product; anyone can produce them; encourage design thinking since prototypes are visibly not finalized.
- Cons: Lack of realism, so users might have a hard time giving feedback; hard to apply results from crude early versions; may be too basic to reflect the user experience of the finished product; can oversimplify complex issues; lack of interactivity deprives users of direct control; users must imagine how they would use the product.
High-fidelity
- Example: Digital prototypes created on software such as Sketch or Adobe XD
- Pros: Engaging—all stakeholders have the vision realized in their hands and can judge how well it matches users’ needs and solves their problems; testing will yield more accurate, more applicable results; versions closest to the final product enable you to predict how users will take to it in the marketplace.
- Cons: Longer/costlier to create; users are more likely to comment on superficial details than on content; after hours of work, you the designer are likely to dislike the idea of making changes, which can take considerable time; users may mistake the prototype for the finished product and form biases.

Some designers split high-fidelity prototyping into “mid-fidelity” (where prototypes can have basic digital interactivity or be slick wireframes) and “high-fidelity” (where they’re far closer to the final version). Interactive prototypes yield far more useful results in user tests. However, fidelity is relative—a static mockup of a landing page, for example, is of higher fidelity than sketched cut-outs users can move. Overall, you should always commit to prototyping with the users’ needs in mind, particularly with an eye for user flow.