A Graphical Guide to Prototyping

Ian Schoen
2 min readOct 31, 2014

Prototyping can serve a number of distinct purposes and can take on different forms dependent on what you want to examine. At a low fidelity, a prototype can be a simple sketch to help visualize a product. At a high fidelity, a prototype can nearly represent the final product — a fully functional product built with working code.

The kind of prototyping you chose to do is largely determined as a function of fidelity and interactivity. Because of this, I wanted a quick and easy way to visualize this model to give me a better sense of when to use what and what tools would be best to accomplish my goals.

Inspired by Kate Rutter, one of my mentors, I mapped out this graphical guide for prototyping. The graph on the left is a representation of different prototyping techniques you can use to test a product at different points in your process and the graph on the right shows you specific tools you can use to complete that kind of prototyping.

Hope this can be helpful to others!

The list of tools I chose are those that I decided to try out and liked and those I have used before. Here are some links to the apps:

Enjoy!

I’d love to hear from you! Tweet me @icschoen.

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