Thought Exercise: Prototyping

Agile Strategy

What is it?

It’s a visual model that represents a possible solution to the design challenge. In so many words: it’s a rough draft—of a package design, poster, anything…

Why do it?

Create prototypes to rapidly and cheaply see, literally, what a design idea or solution looks like on paper. Also, it is useful when generating ideas or deciding amongst ideas to have something you can touch and hang up and look at.

More polished prototypes (aka mockups) are useful when presenting to or facilitating feedback from customers, team members, and any business leaders or UNI stakeholders you may be working with.

When to do it?

Do it continuously, throughout the product development life cycle. Specifically, when preparing a design for feedback or presentation or to visually jot an idea to reference at a later time.

How to do it?

Paper prototyping: Use paper, pens, and sticky notes to rapidly sketch the design. Great for initial concepts and idea generation.

Digital prototyping (mockups): Use a mockup template to place your image, edit the text, and save the smart object layer — Photoshop will do the rest to generate a photorealistic product “mockup.”

The agile flavor

Prototypes are tools that can be developeda collaboratively and can be referenced and shared by all the team. The key agile takeaway is to get ideas down on paper, up on the wall, and do just enough —but no more—to get to the next stage of product development without doing a huge, up-front, pixel-perfect design.