Low-fidelity prototyping

Prototyping is at the core of Interaction Design practice from ideation to the final product. Even though prototypes can be a long way from the intended look and feel they are relevant to the design process for many different reasons. They provide means to learn from the problem, weigh solutions, gather information, evaluate designs, originate feedback and engage the team, clients and stakeholders during the product development life cycle.

In the beginning of a project prototypes are useful to bring together the exploration of concepts with the definition of the system’s behavior. Working with low fidelity prototypes at this stage is a way of empathically understanding a user’s experience of a specific system; in terms of service design it means prototyping the touchpoints so to understand the user journey (or customer experience, if you prefer) and provide a tangible view on what is going to happen. In the case of starting production design it means prototyping existing ideas and designs, test, gather feedback and improve.

Low fidelity prototypes are relevant at the beginning of a project when many ideas or directions need to be tested and discussed. For the team this is an opportunity to experiment with ideas by making them tangible and for the client to have a clear understanding of what the product is going to be right from the early stages.

Prototypes are as much about the solution as they are about the problem. Prototyping a possible solution reflects one’s existent knowledge of the problem. As prototypes start to be tested the problem unfolds and the team becomes more informed about what to think about and the brief to design to. In this learning by doing practice - creating, testing and modifying - prototypes are a resourceful way to gather requirements and inform the next design iteration.

At another level, prototyping is a useful way of working around a user’s mental model and the mental model implicit in the designs. Don Norman elaborates on mental models in the “Design of Everyday Things” as a way to understand how users develop an idea of how a given system works, by what it affords to, what are the patterns of use, what is the outcome of actions, where to go next while doing a specific task.

Alternatively, sketching is also a common approach but in terms of defining the user experience different outcomes will arise in the design process from using sketches or low fidelity prototypes. Bill Buxton refers to this, saying: sketches present questions, prototypes provide answers; sketches suggest, prototypes describe; sketches explore, prototypes refine; sketches propose, prototypes test; sketches provoke, a prototype resolves.

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Posted on 10.29.08 to interaction, service design, design process, prototype, methods, exploration, low fidelity, paper. Subscribe to follow comments on this post. No comments yet. Add your thoughts or trackback from your own site.