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XD Ideas   /   Process   /   Prototyping

Prototyping

What is prototyping in UI design? Prototyping is an integral part of the design process. It allows you to turn a vision into something tangible in order to test your hypothesis with real users. Prototyping allows product teams to experiment and explore various approaches to an idea before selecting the one that is most valuable both from a business and user standpoint. Read about different approaches for prototyping and choose the one that works best for your organization and needs.

Prototyping

How to Craft Design Vision Stories

By Gabi Duncombe

When designing products, communicating your vision to your team is critical. Do this with a design vision story.

Wireframing

Everything You Need to Know About Wireframe Design and Prototypes

By Nick Babich

Learn about when and how to use wireframes and prototypes in the design process.

Prototyping

MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) in UX Design

By Vincent Brathwaite

Why is an MVP important in UX design? Learn more about MVPs and how to create them here.

What Is the Purpose of Prototyping?

The goal of a product creator is to ensure that their product satisfies the user’s needs. At the beginning of the design process, product teams form ideas that revolve around solving user’s problems. Sometimes, product teams skip right into developing a product without doing adequate user testing. When this happens, a waterfall design process is often followed, and all significant resources go into developing the actual product.

Following this process, designers sometimes use the “ship early” strategy where they release a product prior to user testing and validate it with real users in the market. Sadly, shortly after product release, many teams realize that their designs have no traction with real users. But how do you ensure that your team builds a product that people actually want? By prototyping your ideas. Prototyping allows product teams to explore and validate ideas before investing too many resources in building an actual product.

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To minimize the risk of product failure, many product design teams move away from the waterfall process to Lean UX methodology. Lean UX design is a design mindset that stresses the importance of building a prototype with minimum viable functionality and validating it with your target audience through testing. By following Lean UX, product teams measure the success of their ideas by comparing real outcomes against expected outcomes.

What Are the Different Types of Prototyping?

There are various types of prototyping in design, including sketching, paper prototypes, low-fidelity wireframes, and interactive and HTML prototypes. The right prototyping to use depends on factors like what problems you’re trying to solve and the resources available to you.

Depending on the maturity of an idea, prototypes might have different fidelity. They range from hand-drawn paper prototypes that resemble basic objects of user interfaces to pixel-perfect layouts created in prototyping tools that look and function almost like a finished product. Low-fidelity prototypes are more suitable for the early stages of the product development process (when you need to experiment and try various approaches) while high-fidelity prototypes are more suitable for the later stages when you have a solid understanding of what you want to build.

But no matter what fidelity your prototypes have, they allow you to understand the problem space better and propose your solution to other team members and stakeholders. People can understand a proposed UI design concept better when they can interact with it and see how it works. Browse our collection of prototyping-related articles where you can regularly learn tips, tricks and best practices for developing prototypes.

Who Should Prototype?

From business professionals and developers to designers and those in UX/UI and beyond, all have something to gain from prototyping. Considering how many prototyping tools are available today, everyone can and should prototype. Prototyping saves you time and money, and most importantly, helps you build a better product for your users.

Browse our assortment of prototyping related articles where you can regularly learn how to create a product that is right for your company.

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An illustration of button states when interacted with by a human hand.
UI Design

Designing States for Buttons & UI Interactions

By Matt Rae

Explore the different types of button states that improve the end-user experience adding value to your products.

Illustration of a website in different layout
Prototyping

Low Fidelity vs. High Fidelity Prototyping

By Nick Babich

In today’s industry of rapidly-growing products, user experience (UX) design has become increasingly important. It’s clear that design-led companies outperform their competitors. Prototyping plays a vital role in the process of creating successful UX,

Prototyping

Best Practices for Storytelling in Product & Service Design

By Oliver Lindberg

Storytelling is a powerful device not only for onboarding new customers, but also for defining your actual brand, product, and service. It can function as the common thread that runs through an entire experience, whatever device is used to interact wit

Abstract shapes with blue background
Prototyping

Prototyping: Bringing an Idea to Life

By Oliver Lindberg

It can be easy to get carried away with exciting ideas or to give in to clients’ demands too much, but without prototypes you run the risk of building experiences that don’t work for your users or clients. Prototyping keeps you in check. To sum up its

Lamp on top of an iPhone
Prototyping

Prototype Testing and Evaluation

By Nick Babich

No matter what product you’re working on, whether it is a website, mobile app, landing page, it’s always important to validate your design decisions before you ship them to users. Some product teams postpone validation until they have an almost complet

Purple squares connected to each other
Prototyping

The Fundamentals of Wireframing and Prototyping

By Christopher Murphy

The best design follows an iterative process where designers can share, test and validate ideas quickly and collaboratively. Usually the process goes something like this: You undertake research, working with users to identify the underlying user requir

Blocks in yellow shades on a purple background
Prototyping

What is Rapid Prototyping?

By Nick Babich

If you’re a designer working on a project and you face a problem that you want to solve, you most likely will spend some time ideating and, after a while, come up with a potential solution. Without any doubt, you’ll then put some effort into building t

Illustration of a woman sleeping in her bed
Prototyping

6 Things I Learned by Building My First Voice Prototype

By Cara Neel

With sales of smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home on the rise, and built-in voice assistants pre-installed on most smartphones, voice experiences are becoming increasingly prevalent. And the number of voice experiences is growing rapidl

illustration of people communicating with devices
Prototyping

Ask a UXpert: How to Prototype Voice Experiences that Delight Users

By Oliver Lindberg

Speech, of course, is fundamental to the way we communicate; talking to a voice interface is different from how we interact with a screen and a graphical interface. We’ve already explored some of the lessons learned and best practices to keep in m

purple background with website wireframes
Prototyping

How I Learned to Love the UX Prototype

By Steven Sassaman

I built my first prototype six years ago in a last-ditch attempt to break through one of those logjams that make designers question their career choices. Despite numerous presentations and discussions, I hadn’t been able to secure sign-off because the

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