Choosing the right prototyping tools for user research
Tl;dr—Don’t just research to design; design to research by picking a tool that aligns with your research needs.
A meaningful user research process isn’t a phase at the start of your project—it’s an ongoing conversation with the people that will use your product, stretching from defining their problems to quality testing the solution.
Prototyping is a key part of the research process. From day one of product development, you can start sketching out ideas to help articulate them to users and get their feedback.
The key is not to hold back on prototyping until you’ve done “enough” research, but instead to be strategic about how you produce your prototype to match your research needs.
Design to research by first figuring out what your research questions are, and then picking a tool that will let you get at those insights. Here are some tips for choosing tools for testing.
Sharing big ideas
Paper prototyping is my personal favourite when it comes to research tools, because anybody can do it—even your user.
Often at the beginning of product development, you may not know what problem you’re solving for. Even if you think you do, you may be missing something. While you’re just getting a grip on your users’ needs, paper sketching is a cheap and quick way to articulate ideas and get feedback.
Paper prototyping is also a great way to get users to share their ideas with you through co-design research. If they have a strong reaction to something you’ve shown them, ask them to iterate on a piece of paper they have lying around. User sketches capture their priorities and help get them invested in continuing to do research with you. You can do this remotely by asking them to take a picture and share it with you in Steadfast Messenger.
Validating concepts
You’ve arrived at an idea and you think you want to dive deep. Before you do, do a gut check. Check in with users—does this concept make sense to them?
When you’re trying to understand whether your product matches your users’ mental models, a low-fidelity tool like Balsamiq or Sketch (with a wireframe UI kit like this one) is what you need. It’s easy to put together your prototype by dragging and dropping elements, and to make it clickable with InVision.
A low-fidelity digital tool lets you articulate your vision and put it in front of users to make sure you’re on the right track before moving up to the next stage of fidelity.
Ideating, iterating, testing
As you build out your product, you want to get into the details of your user experience, asking your users not only about the ideas they’re seeing but also the interactions and pathways they’re engaging with. You also want to present something that isn’t too messy or too stylized to distract them (and you!) from focusing on the UX.
“Don’t just research to design; design to research by picking a tool that aligns with your research needs.”
Axure is a powerful tool for this phase, especially when it comes to usability testing. It lets you create realistic interactions and, once you get past the learning curve and get fast, iteration is no problem.
Testing for look and feel
Visual design is a really important part of your relationship with your users—it’s a communication that inspires a feeling about your product, and it’s important to capture insights from your users’ reactions to it to make sure it aligns with your vision. Testing for look and feel calls on a high-fidelity tool, of which there are many, like Sketch, Photoshop, Framer, and of course code.
Research and design always go hand-in-hand. Don’t just research to design—design for research by reverse-engineering your prototype to match your testing goals.
