Why prototyping leads to impact
Everyone has great ideas. But there are 2 primary problems with ideas:
- They’re not testable! Ideas need to interact with reality. So if you want to test your ideas, you need to translate them into some form that enables them to be evaluated by others. There are lots of ways to do this, but prototyping is my favorite, for reasons I’ll get into soon.
- You can only evaluate your ideas using your own perspective. But nobody shares your exact mindset, and so you need to get people will other perspectives to test your ideas to ensure that they’re as crazy about them as you are.
But fear not! The solution to all your problems is, you guessed it, prototyping! I’m focusing on software prototyping for the purpose of this post, but the same principles apply to hardware. Prototyping allows you to bridge psychological distance, get your ideas into the hands of people able to critically evaluate them, and walk away with key insights to optimize your product.
Prototyping is very easy to learn. There are a variety of tools out there that enable people of all skill levels to prototype for free/cheap. And you don’t need to be able to design a beautiful prototype that looks just like you want the final version to; all you need to do is be able to sketch out the general architecture of your app or website or whatever so that you can test that. Yes, the better your prototype is, and the more fidelity it has (meaning the more closely it resembles the final, professional version you want to build), the more detailed the insight you cultivate will be. But there’s a lot you can do with a grey box wireframe, and as you can see in that picture, you don’t need a whole lot of design skill to put it together.
So why does prototyping lead to impact? Because great products and impactful services aren’t built in a vacuum. They’re built by interacting with your users early and often, and prototyping is the only way to do that well. Whether your goal is to build the next Instagram or design a solution to a social issue like the lack of diversity in tech, prototyping is the only way you’ll be able to construct a feedback loop that enables you to integrate user insight into your development process.
If you live in/around NYC, are interested in prototyping, and have a thirst for social impact, please check out ProtoHack! Use the code ‘socialimpact’ for a 25% discount, and please reach out to me if you have any questions or would like to get involved. My email is amos @ protohack.org.
