Author: Admin

A digital prototype is a critical component of the startup designing process to visualize your product, its functions and how your users will interact with it.

Most importantly, though, rapid digital prototyping helps test the waters without overcommitting and risking a lot of money and resources on an idea. 

A myth prevalent in the startup community is that you need developers and coding expertise to build a digital prototype. In reality, you only need to know about a few key components laid down below and any of the preliminary prototyping strategies discussed further.

Let’s dive in.

Critical Components of the Testing Process

People – Who is your product for? And who needs to observe your ideal users interacting with your product idea? Define the customer persona and internal teams who will be involved in the prototyping process.

Location – Where will you carry out the prototype testing process? Does it simulate the environment your app users will be in when interacting with the product? Lay down the possible settings your ideal customers will be in when using your product.

Objects – Will your ideal customer interact with anything else while using your product? Lay down a list of objects your customers will be in touch with when they interact with your product.

Interactions – What other interactions will your customers be having when using your product? Define all digital and physical interactions that may be happening simultaneously.

These four components are vital to the prototype testing process. They offer insight into the user on a deeper level to facilitate a design that resonates with them at any given moment.

5 Ways of Developing a Rapid Digital Prototype

Sketches and Diagrams

Sketches and diagrams help people in all walks of life convey complex ideas with simplicity. Why not for startup founders, too? 

This earliest form of prototyping can help you illustrate ideas and processes and share them with your teammates for further discussion. Once a sketch or a mind map can lay down the structure and system of your idea, you can refine it with external input to reach something that can be translated into a product’s first working version.

Besides, sketching an idea can help you find anomalies, gaps, bridges and relationships that you may not discover while working out a concept in your mind. Leverage journey maps, flow diagrams and other mapping and diagramming tools to scope complex ideas and build on them.

Storyboards

Storyboards are another low-fidelity way to refine and validate concepts and obtain early and inexpensive feedback before writing functional requirements for a product. The process involves defining the user scenario along with their intent and goals first.

Then you start sketching concepts using a whiteboard and markers or a pen and paper. Next, you create the screens using a simple PowerPoint or Slides tool. Use those tools to illustrate each step a user goes through with your product and find interaction points as well as hurdles.

Test and iterate!

The differentiating factor about storyboarding is that you take the entire user journey into account and capture it in sketches or diagrams with empathy. Generating the user story and journey sparks the right conversations around user experience.

Lego Prototypes

The success of Lego hinges on the imagination of its users. Since Lego makes building, tweaking and dismantling prototypes child’s play, it can be an effective tool to build them. Lego prototyping is extensively used by the best and the most prominent firms worldwide to follow design thinking.

As a company, Lego takes its product’s ability to spark creativity seriously, investing in research and development to build methodologies such as Lego Serious Play that aims to improve creative thinking and problem solving skills.

Use Lego bricks to build a product prototype or Lego characters to outline the user’s journey and experience.

Wizard of Oz 

The Wizard of Oz prototyping method requires three components:

• A script to direct actions that take place
• A person who plays the role of the user
• A human wizard who will perform tasks simulating the product

The user may or may not know that the tasks are performed by a human and not by a finished product. Just like the wizard of Oz in the fable, a person will mimic aspects of the product’s functioning for the sake of prototyping and gathering feedback.

The most common use of the WOZ method could be in prototyping a digital system where users are made to believe that system responses are computer-driven but are actually human-driven.

User-driven Prototypes

The user-driven prototyping method turns the tables. Instead of developing a prototype yourself and then presenting it to the user for input, you let the user create a prototype and observe and draw insights from the process.

As the user designs a solution, you learn about the basic assumptions they made and the approach they took. The purpose here is not to build upon the prototype developed by the user but to draw learnings from their approach and thinking.

The key here is to ask users to develop something that lets you understand how they think about certain things- challenges in their life, perceptible solutions, etc.

Which Prototype Makes Sense for You?

With such a wide range of ways, it might get hard for you to choose one to create your prototype. Consider mulling over your product idea, things that you want to learn about your users and how you want to approach the designing.

Decide based on those pointers as to which prototyping process would work best for you.

The rapid prototyping process can form the cornerstone of your success as a startup owing to a prototype’s usefulness in validating an idea, garnering early support and funding and demonstrating value to early customers.

Make sure you choose the right rapid prototyping partner. Speak to us at KiwiTech for our software prototyping services. 

Prototyping plays a critical role in every startup in defining product features, polishing the user experience, selling an idea to investors or presenting it to team members. 

Prototyping need not be restricted to the early phase in product development but can be a means to validate subsequent developments and changes in a product or service.

Why is Rapid Prototyping Critical for Startups?

Prototypes are helpful in representing a use case in a functional way to solicit feedback from users. Whether or not they get interested and invested in the product or service is irrelevant as far as the prototyping process goes.

The only thing you need from the process is data around your customers’ situational context, perspectives and motivations that form their opinions. Prototypes are tools to validate your assumptions about your user, their needs and expectations.

Validating assumptions is critical to preventing costly redirections down the line during product development. Since you can’t rely on a user’s imagination or what they say about their own needs, you need a working prototype to find out what they do with it so you can be sure that the foundation of your idea is solid.

The Four-step Prototyping Process

Prototyping at an accelerated pace can expedite the entire development process while also eliminating the risks of failure. Follow this simple process to develop a prototype for your product.

Basics First

At its basic, rapid prototyping is all about saving costs. It involves starting simple with an open-source wireframing tool to convey the product’s layout concept and preliminary content. Then, you test and validate this prototype with users and rapidly develop subsequent prototypes incorporating user feedback at every stage. 

With the no-code tools available today, you can quickly develop a simple prototype to demonstrate what your product will help users achieve.

Review and Solicit Feedback

Startup failure rates are increasingly high due to ignorance of this very step. Developing a business is risky. So you need enough validation for your product – its features and design elements to be sure that investing in it will not be a mistake.

The key to doing that is to continuously  create quick iterations of your prototype and pass them to your ideal customers to get their insights and feedback. This process helps you develop a product that your audience wants. Moreover, it allows you to fail faster and cheaper.

Since you validate your product with real users, you always respond to their demands and leave no room for surprises at the end of the development process, preventing failure.

Refine for High Fidelity

Depending on your objective for this rapid prototyping process, you may or may not need a high-fidelity prototype. For instance, if you want to learn whether or not your customers have a particular problem or if you want to test if your solution might be acceptable to the users- you may not need a high-fidelity prototype.

However, if you want to test the nuances of a solution, you need a high-fidelity prototype.

With the reviews and insights gathered through rapid prototyping, you can add more features and enhancements, or remove unnecessary ones from your product to progress toward a high-fidelity prototype.

A high-fidelity prototype precedes the first product version. Therefore, it’s a critical milestone to reach. At this stage, identify and validate features and functionality in the product that will be valuable for the user and eliminate everything that is either extra or overbearing.

Repeat

Rapid prototyping applauds early, cheap and frequent failures. Therefore, even after four rounds of the same process, great going if you stumble upon another failure! You’re further on the path than when you started fresh.

Repeat the process laid down to make quick mistakes often and inch closer to what your customers might need and appreciate with each iteration. When user feedback starts to closely resemble what you have on the table, you might have done the job.

Analysis of Feedback and Next Steps

We want to assume you have a lot of feedback now, having been through a comprehensive prototyping process.

All the gathered feedback will fall into one of the following categories-

• How your customers perceive your product and proposed solution
• The elements they like and dislike about your solution
• How they compare your product with existing competitors and prospects
• The pricing they expect for your product based on market standards and their spending habits
• The way they describe your product to their friends and family
• Their reference for someone else who faces the same problem

As you gather feedback and act on it, it’s important to continually ask the following questions-

• Is this my ideal customer?
• If I focused on one more customer segment, what would be different or similar about their motivations, situation and behavior?
• Is this the right problem to solve or does anything else need solving before this one?
• Is my way of approaching this problem the best way?

Analyzing and assessing user feedback based on those questions will keep you focused on the problem at hand and open up avenues for broader thinking that may lead to newer insights.

This thinking will either reinforce your solution as the best one or challenge you to approach the problem from a newer angle or position.

If you’d rather work with a team of prototyping specialists to build a working prototype and validate your product idea, contact us today for our software prototyping services. At KiwiTech, we make this less complicated and more intuitive with our wealth of experience working with startups and enterprises.

Often when we hear the term ‘design’, we think of aesthetics and colors and fonts. But, as expert UX designers would agree, UX designing is so much more than what appears on the screen.

UX designing not only makes a software product or application aesthetically pleasing but also functional, usable and navigable. And that contributes to UX designing being a rare art.

An experienced UX designing team can put you years ahead of the competition by making your product look, feel and function like something your ideal users would want to use and come back to repeatedly.

Since it’s both a science and a craft, let’s look at the top design principles that help UX designers create experiences that last and linger.

Principles of UX Design

Know and follow these design principles to create user experiences that awe and serve your product users.

Meet the Customer Demand

The first principle that a proficient UX designer knows and follows is to stay centred on the user. It’s all about enhancing the experience of the user from the product.

So, learn what the user expects from the experience at each touchpoint and stage of interaction. A particular design or feature may impress you, but are you the user? 

This is when user testing and other validation methods come into play. Designing in solitary can be a big mistake when it comes to this principle. You want to engage end users early and often, so that you don’t make assumptions that prove to be different from your customers’ reality.

Take Care of the Hierarchy

To achieve smooth navigation and ease of use in your application, you need a transparent hierarchy. The primary hierarchy will arrange information throughout the design (laying down the navigation bar and the main sections). And the secondary hierarchy will delve deep into subcategories of functionality and content.

Keeping important information in visually prominent positions and hiding lesser relevant information in deeper layers will improve the overall simplicity, navigability and flow of the user experience. 

Make sure the content and functions flow effortlessly and naturally from the last level to the next throughout the design.

Keep it Consistent with Current Habits

A critical component of user experience designing is knowing your customer’s habits and inclinations. Since we know this about humans- they don’t want to change- it’s important to use a familiar user interface and layout as some of the popular brands that your customers are already habitual of.

This cuts short the adjusting your users have to do as your app feels and looks familiar to them, which adds to the user-centricity part of UX design.

Users will come to your app with a pre-existing hunch of how things will be and their presumptions should be respected because it’s not the easiest thing to try to change them.

Moreover, ensure you offer the same design and functionality through different products for consistency purposes.

Design for Accessibility

An increasingly critical principle in UX designing is accessibility. It’s important to ensure that your app is usable by as many people as possible, respecting everyone’s ability to consume and process digital information.

Designing for accessibility is not only the right thing to do but a profitable thing to do, too. People with disabilities contribute over 10% of the world population today and it’s important to keep them in mind when designing an experience.

A few simple ways to build an accessible UX are to use contrasting colors for text against a background and having captions on videos. 

Factor in User’s Context

Designing in the users’ context is equivalent to designing with empathy. Here’s why:

When you factor in the contextual data points, you start empathizing with the user in the very moment.

Contextual data may include the user’s geographical location, their whereabouts, their surroundings, emotional state, physical state, mental well-being, the time they have available, the device they are likely using and the people who influence them and so much more.

The more contextual data you work with, the more likely your UX design will resonate with your customers. For instance, say your user is likely accessing your application on their phone on a lunch break at work. What design elements could make their experience easier and better? 

Or, if they are accessing your app in a dingy club at midnight, what sort of experience would help them take action?

Focus on Usability

Your app or solution aims to solve a problem for the user. So it makes sense to focus primarily and heavily on the usability of your application. How easily can a user achieve what they intend to on your application?

A cluttered experience will overwhelm and confuse the user and lose them. Make sure that your UX design is purposeful and meaningful. Concentrate on clarity of messaging and functionality to bring out the best in your product.

Usability testing is key to finding out how users interact with your design. Conduct usability tests comprehensively to discover and plug usability loopholes.

Design for Simplicity

A simplistic design beats a complex one all the time. Less is more when it comes to UX designing. Minimalist designs that offer just the right options and functionality to get the job done are winners in this distracted age.

Not only that, simplicity in language can also make your application user friendly and usable. Consider every aspect of UX design end-to-end from a simplicity perspective and strive to build the most straight-forward application your users have ever experienced.

As you delve into UX designing, you will realize that UX designers are rare specialists. At KiwiTech, we house sought-after UX designers who create functional, usable and pleasing experiences for startups and enterprises. Contact us today if you’re looking for UX design services.