A prototype is a limited representation of the final product, one that facilitates interaction and visualisation over technical details and requirements. It allows stakeholders to evaluate and provide feedback about the feasibility of your current design, better than with a document of user/system requirements. It is also expensive to implement ideas, which means it would take a long time and lots of resources to test and identify design flaws. Often, these errors are expensive to correct after implementation, and maybe left unchecked due to constraints. Prototypes instead allow you to quickly iterate over ideas and improve the design till you have a usable design, and affords some creativity early on.
Some drawbacks of prototyping include:
- in some scenarios, it may be a duplication of effort
- depedning on the kind of prototype, it can give stakeholders the impression that the product is nearly complete
Lo-fi prototyping
Low fidelity prototypes are quick and inexpensive mock-ups of the concepts, that are usually discarded at the end of the design. They are renditions of what the product should look like, without all the details. They’re usually made in different mediums to the final work, and are flexible to allow for tweaking and experimentation. Some
Paper-based