Perfect Your Designs With Prototypes
Prototyping is an effective way to refine requirements and explore design solutions. Here are numerous tips for effective prototyping.
Designing a new product is a messy process. It involves initial brainstorming, rough concepts, false starts, and extensive refinement. Good designs begin with an identified need or opportunity, and they’re based on a solid understanding of the product’s requirements. No matter how skilled the requirements analyst is or how informed and cooperative the customer participants are, the first set of requirements they develop will be only approximately correct. It takes a process of iterative refinement and validation to accurately understand the requirements for any nontrivial product.
Designs that sound good in theory often do not succeed in real life. Unless you’re an extraordinarily gifted — and lucky — designer, your first solution ideas won’t be the best. This reality leads to an important lesson for every designer to remember:
Design demands iteration.
Creating an optimal design involves multiple cycles of understanding the problem, identifying and understanding users, articulating requirements, devising solutions, evaluating those solutions, and then refining both the problem itself…
